How to avoid hiring people who misrepresent themselves on their resume

Did you know that 85% of job applicants will misrepresent themselves on their resumes? The cost of a bad hire is usually 30% of the employees first year’s earnings. A bad hire is not only disruptive to your business it is also costly. From our experience, we have become masters at spotting deception from little white lies, to full-blown fraud! There are three common areas where tech professionals are mostly likely to inflate their resumes and what you can do to prevent being tricked:

1. Technical skills: We have all seen the resumes with a laundry list of technologies. It is common practice for candidates to list every technology they have ever heard of to get through the initial screening and bypass the ATS. So how do you know if a candidate can actually use these technologies or if they have only read about them. Most tech companies these days include technical testing in their hiring process to verify candidates skills. This will allow you to determine if the candidate actually knows how to use these technologies and has experience using them. If you are still not testing candidates technical skills, what are you waiting for?
2. Reasons for leaving previous jobs: Like a break up no one wants to admit they were let go from a job. Being fired for poor performance, absenteeism, or lacking skills is never something you want to advertise. Going a step further and doing a background check on LinkedIn can be the difference between a good and a bad hire! A recent story from our own recruiter is proof of this: while looking to hire someone, she took to LinkedIn to look into some of his listed job experience and found, after reaching out to who his supervisor should have been, the experience on his resume was indeed false. Long story short, doing these extra steps is crucial and 100% necessary.
3. Education: When you are hiring candidates from other cities or countries it might be hard to know if the school they went to even exists. Lucky for you, any candidate that is a new immigrant or is in the process of immigrating to Canada, has probably already done a credential recognition process. Ask to see their credential recognition, so you can see what their education is to the equivalent in Canada. Now if the candidate is from Canada, you will want to ask for proof of the documentation they claim to have. You surely do not want to end up hiring a software tech who doesn’t have the proper education.

From the research we know that everyone fibs a little on their resume, however by relying less on resumes and more on candidate screening tools, you will be able to find the best candidate for the role. At GTA, we use our FaasTR tool which screens candidates technical ability, soft skills, communication skills and willingness to learn to help screen and rank candidates for our clients. If you are interested in learning more and booking a demo, please reach out to Ollie.