Why more and more people are dishonest on their resumes

By Neil Patrick

Are you more honest than a banker? Under what circumstances would you lie, or cheat, and what effect does your deception have on society at large?

Over the last couple of weeks, I've looked at the rise and rise of lying. Specifically on LinkedIn and then last week on resumes.

And I suggested why I thought this might be happening. But I’m not a psychologist and I wanted to understand better why people lie about themselves more and more in their professional life.

After a little more research, I think I have found some answers. And here’s what I think is going on.

Most people are mostly honest most of the time

There are very few out and out frauds and cheats. People who deliberately set out to deceive and cheat at every single opportunity. Equally, there are very few people who are scrupulously honest in every single aspect of their lives. And if you don’t believe me, think about the last time a friend or spouse asked you for feedback on something they had made or done. Are you always brutally honest?

Of course you are not…your wish to make the other person feel good (or at least not so bad) far outweighs your worries about being slightly deceitful in your response. Which brings us to the second point which is that: 

Lying is circumstantial

The situation we are presented with may increase or decrease our propensity to lie or gild the truth. And the factor which has a profound effect on this is the perceived distance between our actions and the people that our lies affect. The greater the perceived distance and noise that obscures our vision, the greater our propensity to lie.

In the job hunting situation, this is why so many lies are exposed at interviews. It’s much easier to tell a lie on LinkedIn or our resume, than it is to repeat that lie face to face when questioned about it. The evidence shows that time again, when challenged face to face, people ‘fess up.

The growth of digital media opens up our ability to communicate with more and more people. But it also creates a sense of greater separation between us and others when for example we are looking for a new job. If we see a job vacancy online, do we feel as close to the employer as we’d do if we saw a card in a shop window asking for new staff to help out? 

We try to rationalise our lies

Most people wish to think of themselves as being good and honest. But when the temptation to lie becomes too great to resist, we try to make ourselves feel better about it, through rationalization. Like, saying to ourselves, “How much harm can it really do?”, or “It’s not really anything much”.

The stakes influence our choices

In a low stakes situation, our propensity to lie is also low. But as the stakes increase, so the propensity to lie does also. And if we are desperate for any reason to get a new job, the stakes are high. So our propensity to tell lies is increased. Ironically, this fact actually supports the choice that recruiters and HR people often make to choose only from the ranks of those currently in jobs. I still don’t think it justifies such a policy, but it does have this attraction to employers.

The stakes were also high in the financial world pre the 2008 collapse. The distance between the lies and those it affected were great. The actions which we now know caused the collapse could be rationalized however spuriously. So we had a perfect set of conditions for cheating. Overlay incentives which reward the wrong behaviors and we have the perfect recipe for the 2008 meltdown.


Online job applications and Linkedin are a perfect set of conditions to encourage lies

Looked at in these ways, the epidemic of resume and Linkedin lies can be explained and understood: 

• The deception is thought of as small and therefore can be justified 
• The distance between the liar and the people it harms is seen as great 
• The rewards for getting away with it are high 

And last but not least, if we are told that everyone is doing it, then there’s a peer pressure effect which creates a vicious circle. If everyone else is cheating, then I need to as well, or I'll be disadvantaged.

What do you think? Are we headed towards an ever increasing downward spiral of lies, or is there a hope for a return to greater truthfulness? And if so, how might it be achieved in the digital age…? Do please post any thoughts below.

I'll return to this topic again after I have gathered some reactions and ideas.

Finally here’s some really insightful background from Dan Ariely, one of the world's leading authorities on human motivation and behavior, which amongst many other insights explains just why so many financial people deceived us and themselves for so long.

Why you should think twice about taking a job with a huge bonus plan

By Neil Patrick

We work to earn money. And the more money we earn, the happier we will be. Well not quite.

Research shows that the happiest and most productive workers are not the ones who are given the largest bonuses, but the ones who are given the greatest autonomy and freedom of choice in how they go about their work.

There’s a nasty secret about businesses which pay large bonuses. The giveaway is if these bonuses are linked to sales and/or profits. The companies that do this, even if they are completely legal and ethical are sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Of course businesses must make profits. And they often reflect this by using monetary incentives to give greater rewards to those who make the most profit. But here’s what’s strange. Studies have shown all over the world that greater monetary reward for success with cognitive tasks result in poorer performance.

Huh? How can this be?

The tests have been repeated in different nations, in different types of business and at different levels of employee. And the results have been exactly the same. Greater monetary rewards result in worse performance.

There’s a qualifier though. This only applies when pay is high enough for it not to be a factor. If people are paid enough so that they don’t need to worry about paying their bills, they exhibit this behaviour. If they are struggling to make ends meet, then it doesn’t apply. So this is clearly not an argument to reduce pay. In fact it’s an argument to pay people well, but not to incentivise them with huge monetary bonuses for sales and/or profits.

The most obvious business where this behaviour is the norm is the financial and banking sector. And the collapse of 2008 is strongly associated with behaviors which were influenced by excessive monetary rewards. The provision of large bonuses linked to profit directly led to an increase in bad things. Like making riskier loans, interfering with exchange rates and miss-selling products which customers didn’t want or need. And as these behaviours continued unchecked over years, we all know what happened next.

I’m not arguing against bonuses. What I am arguing is which behaviours these bonuses reward and encourage.

What the studies show is that when work is cognitively based rather than manual, performance declines when simple productivity bonuses are applied. This is explained by the fact that encouraging profit seeking behaviours at the individual level, leads to worse products and services. Corners are cut. Quality is reduced. Prices are inflated.

But this age old practice is now being increasingly challenged. Giving things away for free. Not crappy incentives like pens or free monthly trials of software, but a whole service. Like Skype. Or Twitter. There are of course plenty of people who will argue that Twitters’ IPO was way overvalued. That the whole social media explosion is a bubble which must burst. But the cat is out of the bag now. Regardless of what happens to these businesses, there’s no turning back.

Business sustainability depends on growth and profit. That remains as true today as it has always been. But also at the base of the most sustainable businesses is customer satisfaction, goodwill and preference. The question is how should businesses reward and recognise their staff in the pursuit of these goals?

Monetary reward for greater profits isn’t the answer, at least in the long term. Ensuring the business consistently delights its customers is.

If you want a job with huge bonuses for the sales and profits you deliver and you can get it, that’s fine. Just don’t plan on the business surviving long enough for you to receive your bonus more than a few times…

If you’d like to see a little more about the research on this topic, this RSA video by Dan Pink is a really insightful watch…