Pumping Up Your Past

By Jeffrey Kluger

It's getting hard to tell a good lie--or at least it must seem that way to Sandra Baldwin, the first woman to be named chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee and, as of two weeks ago, the first to resign the post. As far as anyone knows, Baldwin had not told a fib in years, but the last one she did tell was a doozy. On her widely publicized resume, she misrepresented the school from which she earned her bachelor's degree and listed a Ph.D. she never finished. The lies hung around until an alumni magazine threatened to reveal them last month. Baldwin fessed up and left the U.S.O.C. before she could be shown the door.

If it's any consolation to Baldwin, she is not alone in her dissembling. Last week Washington fire chief Ronnie Few agreed to resign when his college degree and a fire-chief-of-the-year award turned out to be fabrications. In the past six months, coaches at Notre Dame, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt were all caught with fiction on their resumes. And these followed a parade of high-profile folks accused of falsifications, including Pat Robertson (claimed he saw combat in Korea), Senator Joseph Biden (inflated his law-school class rank) and historian Joseph Ellis (made up stories about parachuting into Vietnam).

What's behind all this professional prevarication? No one knows for certain, but personnel managers, the gatekeepers of the work force, say it's getting harder and harder to distinguish honest applicants from the growing number of dishonest ones. "Lying," says Wendy Bliss, a consultant with the Virginia-based Society for Human Resource Management, "is happening on a very large scale."

Large indeed. According to a recent survey of 2.6 million job applicants by Colorado-based Avert Inc., which specializes in background checks, 44% of all resumes contain at least some lies. Other surveys by Bliss's group reveal that up to 90% of personnel directors report resume fibs about everything from past salaries to--inexplicably--Social Security numbers. And things aren't any better at the boardroom level. Christian & Timbers, one of the nation's top 10 executive-search firms, found that at least 23% of 7,000 resumes submitted for president, V.P. and board-of-director positions had been at least a little cooked.

But if everyone agrees that the incidence of fibbing is up, nobody agrees why. Employers find that applicants tend to lie more when the economy turns south and jobs grow scarce. The real predictor of who will stretch the truth, however, is not underlying work circumstances but underlying personality. According to psychologist Robin Inwald, head of New York City-based Hilson Research, which sells psychological testing to corporations, almost all job applicants score high on what is known as the guardedness scale--the degree to which they are determined to make a good impression on a potential employer.

What Inwald looks for--and warns companies to be wary of too--is people whose numbers exceed the normal curve. These are the applicants who are trying to come across as unusually, perhaps unrealistically, qualified--an effort that can be disastrous and transparent. "I was interviewing one person whose resume claimed he spoke fluent Spanish," Inwald says. "I began talking to him in my more rudimentary Spanish, and even I recognized that he was answering in only the present tense."

More vexing to employers than ordinary resume padders are the extraordinary ones, people whose accomplishments are so impressive that they don't need to lie. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore--fairly or not--was hit hard for this kind of lily gilding. George O'Leary, the Notre Dame football coach whose inventive resume cost him his job, began lying about his past not before he got his first coaching position but after, when his accomplishments did not need to be exaggerated.

What motivates such ex post facto puffery? "They may have such high expectations of themselves--or think the public does--that they won't admit any flaw," suggests industrial psychologist Seymour Adler of Aon Consulting in New York City. "The overall motivation is to be taken seriously and respected." Besides, once they've got the job, there's less risk in pumping up their past, since employers rarely initiate background checks on employees in good standing.

Of course, as former U.S.O.C. head Baldwin discovered, the truth has other ways of leaking out. And when the lies are revealed, most resume padders don't merely fail; they fail spectacularly. Even as more and more employers take steps to address the problem, conducting background checks or hiring firms to do the work for them, the final responsibility for truth still rests with the job seekers themselves. It's a responsibility they would do well to recognize. Being unemployed is bad enough; even worse is being unemployable.

--With reporting by Sora Song/New York

With reporting by Sora Song/New York