[downandout]

Or maybe he had plenty of experience and technical expertise to competently answer all the interview questions, and even to perform the job in question extremely well. Perhaps he would have been a model hire. There are lots of reasons that people exaggerate their experience, and not all of them mean that the candidate is not well-suited for a given job.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea to do what “Sam” did, but you can’t say that their interview process was broken based solely on the fact that the process identified him as a good candidate after he inflated his resume and did some simple LinkedIn manipulation to try to push himself to the top of the resume stack. Their interview process may in fact have identified and vetted the best man for the job, he was just one that happened to be insecure enough about his work experience to exaggerate it.

[jiofih]

“Inflated his resume” and “simple LinkedIn manipulation” are extremely mild ways of describing what he did. He lied about his entire work experience, role at previous job, and got someone else to pretend they were a VP and cover for them on the phone. This is fraud, not ‘inflating your CV’.

That is, if this story is even real.

[jerf]

As I've often said about the DailyWTF stories, if this story isn't real, one just like it has happened hundreds or thousands of times. It's an outlier, yes, but not something I'd even blink at having had happen to someone, somewhere, at some point. I've only done several dozen interviews and I haven't seen anything that extreme, but I've seen enough stuff that I wouldn't find it that shocking.

(Or, somebody did try to snow me to that extreme but failed to get to the point where we even cared about checking references. I don't mean this as any sort of triumphalism, but just by its nature, it's easier to BS your way through a a management interview than a technical interview. I'd say that's less about one necessarily being "harder" and certainly not about one being "better", but that there's a much larger set of distinct things we may talk about in a tech interview. If you really don't know anything technical, you have much greater odds of getting something asked that rats you out.)