A resume gives you a picture of a candidate’s credentials in a familiar format. It is a compilation of the candidate’s scholarly, extracurricular and professional achievements that can have an impact on the duties he or she needs to perform under your employment. Hence it is very important that you can thoroughly gauge whatever information is present in a resume.
The resume is the first thing that you receive from the aspirant and you often indulge in further interactions after feeling satisfied with whatever you see in the resume. It may save you lots of time if you can make out whether the information contained in the resume is real or fake. You will be saving time and money if you can sidestep the resumes that don’t seem genuine.
Although it is not humanly possible to verify the information present in the resume at first glance and there are some instances when you require external assistance, there are certain indications that can reveal obvious peculiarities. There are many instincts that you develop with experience but even if you haven’t yet got much experience you can look for the following to dig out unseemly information in a resume:
• Project details without specifics: this is a standard feature in resumes carrying made up details. It is very difficult to come up with logical specifics while coming up with fake project details and work experience. Most of the times there are no dates and there are no names. Such details are full of indirect references. A genuine person on the other hand supplies all the details with precision and accuracy and takes extra pains to make sure there are no missing pieces. On the other side of the spectrum a person might try to be too detailed in order to seem genuine but you can make them out with little effort.
• Unnatural language: this is also a knack you can develop as you gain more and more experience. The resumes that carry untrue information don’t sound very natural and the language is strained and the sentences are stiff. You can feel the tension in the way the words have been used and sentences have been formed. There is no natural flow. Sometimes a candidate goes on and on about a particular aspect and sometimes he just has a couple words to say about it. There is no uniform pattern that normally exists on genuine resumes.
• Presence of disconnects: since not everybody is an expert liar you can easily find instances of disconnects in the information presented on the resume. For instance there will be no direct relationship between educational background and work experience. Even among different work experiences you won’t be able to find a uniform pattern. Either the details will be to “tailored” to your job requirement or they will be too haphazard.
• Lots of unverifiable information: there might be lots of information that cannot be substantiated easily. For instance there will the references that cannot be directly traced, there might be an address or a contact number that is not very easy to reach and the names of the schools or universities attended may belong to some remote areas.
• Traces of mixing up: the candidate may also makes up events and dates while trying to be too smart. For instance he might mention overlapping dates while explaining various projects he is supposed to have worked on. He might be present at two different locations in such a manner that physically it is not possible to achieve that.
Similarly you will be able to notice many instances that cannot be straightaway corroborated and this should raise your antennas. Of course the art of reading between the lines when it comes to resumes is developed gradually and it is better to leave the task to the experts like Vinform who do background checks and analyze resumes as a profession.
