The perils of padding your CV

The tale of Yahoo! boss Steve Thompson’s resignation over an untruthful CV will have caught the attention of workers across the capital yesterday, and made many others a little nervous.

Thompson’s offence — exposed and trumpeted by a dissatisfied shareholder — was to claim a computer science degree from a college in the Seventies, some years before the institution began offering that course.

His fall from grace is a stark reminder of the dangers of CV enhancement, a risky short-cut to professional success taken by many jobseekers with varying degrees of seriousness.

“A tough climate means people will go to these lengths to find something,” says Logan Naidu, from the Cornell partnership, which hires workers for the biggest City firms.

His staff interview every applicant they are placing to check the key lines on a CV and instruct applicants to remove false claims. “If it is something big, we probably wouldn’t work with them any more,” says Naidu.

Simon Webley, research director at the Institute of Business Ethics, says people behaving like Thompson are less likely to slip through in future. “Ethical due diligence is becoming more of a thing in recruitment, particularly for managerial and senior appointments.”

He says companies are becoming interested in how people will fit in ethically as well as professionally because “if people are dishonest in the small things, they are quite likely not to be honest in the big things”.

So where do employers draw the line between dishonesty and acceptable embellishment?

Naidu says a common but unacceptable claim is when “people say they’ve been a professional day trader when they really mean they had a small stock portfolio, which is different”.

Another popular ruse — which misleads employers but is more transparent — is not to specify what class of degree one got: “People don’t often say they got a first rather than a second but they say second-class honours and don’t specify that it was a lower second.”

While the former could give an employer the ammunition to fire an underperforming worker in retrospect and the latter might just irritate them at interview, both undermine trust, which Webley says is increasingly important.