[dennis_jeeves2]

>The issue is lying about your experiences

Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt. This promotes lying because the liars are the ones that are rewarded with an initial interview. I was talking to a fresh graduate with some volunteer experience who was having difficulty getting a job, and all I could hesitatingly recommenced was to tell him lie on his resume so that his resume could get past the screening.

[_bin_]

My compromise here is invisible words in the PDF. I pack it with every freaking keyword I can think of because I have absolutely no issues with lying to a robot and don't feel the need to a respect a hiring process where they can't be bothered to so much as read my resume. Funny enough I often get offers after that even when I don't have some specific technology.

That said, my personal ethics don't let me lie to an actual person.

[polishdude20]

Do OCR systems still detect invisible words? I would have thought by now they'd use pixel based image recognition.

[filoeleven]

I doubt they're using OCR. More likely they're using one of the many text extractors available for PDFs.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3650957/how-to-extract-t...

[hoerzu]

I think nowadays they directly use screen share and image recognition like https://interview.sh for example

[hansvm]

Interesting, that still works? I first heard about that a decade ago.

[sarlalian]

You can occasionally prompt the AI resume review systems using the white text as well.

[wyclif]

Really depressing to think about, as one who has never tried to game the system.

[jajko]

Nope, that's just rather bland justification of cheating. Not sure how US corporations work, but in Europe any big company would flag you internally so you won't be able to work there for a decade, and the mark still remains in their hiring system afterwards. Just a stupid thing to do, as lying always is.

This are not school exams, company wants to hire the best candidate. If all fail then best failing is still the best candidate, and this can be measured and/or perceived by skilled interviewers.

[wqaatwt]

> would flag you internally

And how would they figure that out if you lie by exaggerating your experience and skills and not outright making up entirely false stuff?

[jajko]

Its up to interviewers but discussed matters can be checked quickly (ah you claim 10 years java backend integration experience? Ok lets dig deep. If reality is (almost) 0 thats lying in plain view).

Also not sure you understand english language, greatly exaggerating or making up stuff is still same lying, details are irrelevant.

[wqaatwt]

> is still same

No it’s not the same. But at this point I’m pretty sure you don’t understand the concept of nuance.

Sure, 10 vs 0 years is obvious. Why even bring up such an example?

What about 7 vs 10 or 3 vs 5? Maybe it’s technically lying but who cares if it works out at the end? What do these numbers even mean? A person who has 3 years of experience in Java can be better than someone who technically has 5..

Especially when those N years requirements are not necessarily put in there by the people who you’re actually going to work in.

[SR2Z]

Even reneging on an offer in the US gets you blacklisted for like 5 years max. It's not personal, it's just business.

[wyclif]

What do you mean by "reneging on an offer"? Do you mean simply turning down an offer? How is that a blacklistable offence?

[nerdile]

Reneging on an offer means revoking it after it has been accepted, and that's poor form.

Turning down an offer puts you into a small category of "people we would hire if we had the chance" and the recruiters or hiring managers will follow up with you for some set period of time just in case something changes on your side. They already have decided you would be a good fit, after all.

[wyclif]

But here's what I don't understand about this: wouldn't that be the company revoking the offer, not the employee? If the company revokes the offer or has "exploding offers" or whatever, that's a corporate thing, not an employee issue.

[SR2Z]

No, this is the following set of steps:

1. Person A interviews at company B

2. Company B says "we'd like to hire you at $X/year"

3. Person A says "that sounds good, I'll start in a month." Company B stops trying to fill the job.

4. Up to a month passes.

5. Person A tells company B "lol nevermind" and doesn't actually start work. Normally this is because company C is offering to pay $Y and $Y >> $X.

It's an employee issue because the employee is not following through on what they said they'd do. Because employment is at-will in the US they're legally in the clear, but the company that was planning on hiring them is still kind of screwed.

[remram]

It's seen as wasting their time.

[gspencley]

> Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt.

Really? That's the bigger issue?

Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?

I don't think that unreasonable expectations should be rewarded. But an unreasonable expectation is just "being stupid and harming yourself."

Deceiving others in order to take their money under false pretences (which is fraud) is immoral and harms others.

The two are not remotely comparable.

> This promotes lying

No it doesn't. If someone feels "encouraged" to lie and defraud others because they want something from them (even if the "someone else" is objectively stupid), that is no one's fault but their own. And their wishes and desires are just as unreasonable as the company's. [The wish/desire on the part of the applicant is wishing that the company had reasonable expectations]

[miki123211]

The problem is that if everybody lies and you're the one not lying, you're worse off. In that scenario, the choice is between lying and being on even footing with everybody else, versus staying honest and getting an unfair disadvantage for it.

If enough participants lie, some of the honest participants get pushed out of the system, which makes lying more socially acceptable, which causes even more participants to lie... and so the feedback loop goes.

[ralferoo]

Not everyone lies. To say everyone does is just lying to yourself in an attempt at rationalisation.

Tell the truth. If you perform poorly in an interview, you now know where your weaknesses are. Work on them. Do a hobby project that lets you gain experience in that area. Use that as an example in your interview. Not only can you be truthful, you'll be more confident as you'll actually understand what you're talking about and can turn it into a positive - "I was weak in this area, so I went off an studied it myself" reveals more about your character than just the specific thing you learned.

[rcxdude]

Half the issue is companies where you won't even get to an interview without a juiced-up CV, and the rest is a interviewing and hiring decision process that doesn't penalize liars. If people felt your advice was the best way to get ahead, then they'd follow it, but when they see people who are just good bullshitters rocket past them in the system, they're not gonna feel good about it.

(How accurate this perception is is an important point: I'm inclined to believe that this nihilistic "everything is bullshit" philosophy is incorrect and self-defeating, but it's hard to deny many high-profile examples that show that bullshitting can be stunningly successful, while honesty and hard work can fail horribly)

[ralferoo]

This still doesn't justify lying to a potential employer. If your CV won't get you to an interview, then you don't have the skills they are looking for.

Aside from lying, you have other choices - spend some time working on personal projects to get the skills you need, obtain a recognised qualification in the skills you need, or try to find some way to obtain those skills in your current job. All of those will increase your real value to the potential employers, and gain you the opportunity to get the interview you want.

If a company catches you lying in an interview, they're absolutely right to blacklist you forever. How do you expect them to ever trust you to be telling the truth in the future if your very first contact with them is built on a lie?

[rcxdude]

You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted.

I'll note I generally have not been desperate enough to try this, firstly because I'm the kind of person who tends to have a pretty big list of skills in the first place (jack of all trades, master of none), and secondly there's generally enough companies I can apply to which have vaguely functioning hiring processes. But I can't say I look at the way some companies hire and say "Well, candidates lying is entirely a problem with them". People respond to incentives and consequences, and when you have a system with a strong incentive to lie and not much risk of consequences, don't be surprised when people do, even if it's not right.

[dennis_jeeves2]

So what would be your advise to a fresh graduate (or even an experienced person) whose resume says experience in ".NET 3.0" where as the job posting says experience needed in ".NET 3.1" ? Remember it's HR or some automated system that does the screening.

[wqaatwt]

Well if the idea is that the lying (to a sane degree) is only necessary to pass the “filter” and that it has limited impact on the candidate’s ability to perform the actual work its not necessarily that straightforward.

[mystified5016]

I mean, we have companies out there posting "entry level" positions and demanding 10 years experience in a technology that's only existed for five.

All bets are off, man.