LIES, DAMNED LIES,
AND R´ESUM´ES
WHEN TOOTING YOUR HORN IS TAKEN TOO FAR
By Bill Kirtz
Call it "canned ham." Call it padding
the past. Whatever phrase you use for it, exaggeration is nearly as common
a promotional device these days as a shoeshine and a smile. To get a job,
stroke an ego, reinforce a fib, just inject your credentials like water
until they expand to what you need.
Few outside a Bette Davis movie go so far as stealing
someone's life, but a woman recently got away with it at Northeastern-for
a while. Queenilla Konah allegedly appropriated the identity of a student
who'd declined admission here. She attended engineering classes, lived
in university housing, ate in university cafeterias. No problem, until
a chance acquaintance called her by another name and the scam unraveled.
Konah now awaits trial on two dozen charges, with possibly more to be filed.
An extreme instance? Sure. Usually, the distinction
between putting your best credential forward and faking experience is a
fine one. People can't quite define it but they know it when they see it,
as a Supreme Court justice once mused about obscenity.
N.U. master's degree holder and part-time business
teacher Tom Kenney sees the "fine line between inflation and falsification"
crossed more and more these days. Kenney, a former personnel director at
Boston Gas who now heads operations at Global Software, concedes, "Everyone
puts a marketing spin on their résumé." He realizes
that in tough professional employment times, "all of us have to show
more. A fifty-year-old might not get a job with an MBA, but he definitely
won't without one." Still, he says, "once you put something down
you don't have, you're cooked."
Kenney and others say nonexistent educational
credentials are the most common and most easily checked no-no. Sometimes,
payback in the form of firing can come years later, as people moving up
the employment ladder get scrutinized for larger responsibilities.
Canning someone already on the job might seem
harsh, but "misrepresentation of credentials is a very serious matter,"
says Katherine Pendergast, N.U.'s vice president for human resources management.
"It's a matter of credibility. I talked with a very able person who
admitted he misrepresented himself. He told me he thought he needed the
credential. I told him, 'The most important credential you have is your
integrity.' "
Pendergast, like many people in hiring positions,
terms résumés marketing tools. "It's your best presentation.
Everyone expects you will put your best version of your experience and
education. [But] there's a big difference between exaggeration and misrepresentation,
which is absolutely outside the bounds of acceptable practice."
What is acceptable practice? The lines can start
to blur early. Edward Wertheim, an associate professor of human resources
management, notes that many parents wink at their children's college application
alchemy-where a few reluctant hours at a soup kitchen morph into an intense
commitment to the underprivileged. Because such stretching is so common,
he says recruiters discount many job-seekers' claims. "There's a lot
of coaching to puff up résumés. We encourage our students
to sell themselves as much as possible, but how [are they] to know where
the line is?"
Wertheim says you cross it when you lie. It's
both wrong and stupid. "It doesn't buy you anything, and it can cost
you a lot. People look for something negative in résumés
to make the pile smaller," he says. He warns against making specific,
easily checkable claims, adding that fibs some applicants think are subtle
are really quite transparent. Saying you're a manager when you've been
a glorified clerk, claiming you left the military voluntarily after nineteen
years-when you get a pension after twenty-are examples of red-flag items
for experienced personnel people. And as regulations make it more difficult
to fire someone, Wertheim points out that a lie on your résumé
may be just the excuse an employer needs to drop the ax.
But what about canned ham to satisfy the ego rather
than the personnel department? The late Boston columnist George Frazier
dubbed this Burke's Disease-successful people shining up their past. Frazier's
phrase commemorates a certain executive's escalation of his benchwarming
college football days into all-American feats. We saw it more recently
with Larry Lawrence, a business titan whose false claims of wartime service
got him buried in Arlington Cemetery until their exposure led to his disinterment.
Such folks have plenty of genuine trophies. Why
massage facts for more? Maybe they don't think they're stretching. "People
convince themselves that their lies are true," says assistant professor
of psychology Jane Bybee. "People can be in denial about half-truths,
and block them out. As the years go by, it's harder to take back the exaggeration."
Bybee, who has published studies on justifications
and excuses, notes that a mouse click can detect academic deception. That's
how one Northeastern department found a teaching applicant's journal articles
not "in press," as he'd claimed, but merely submitted. The puffery
cost him the job he would have gotten without it. Then there was the tenure
candidate who listed a translation of her publication as if it were a new
work, and the one who claimed he'd won an award for which he'd only been
nominated. Thumbs-down, ruled the Ph.D. powers that be.
Bybee has no problems with those decisions. "If
you're dishonest in one respect, what's to prevent you from being dishonest
in others?" she asks.
That's just Mary Helen Gillespie's point. The
Boston Herald's vice president and executive editor says, "For a journalist,
integrity is an extremely valuable asset. You cannot have résumé
exaggeration. It has a very chilling effect on your ability to be accurate
in other areas. As journalists, we are our bylines."
Gillespie, an N.U. journalism grad (with top honors-we
checked) and MBA student here, doesn't limit her outrage at deception to
her own profession. In any business situation, she says, "I'm going
to think, 'I can't trust you on the team I'm building.' "
She and others interviewed can't estimate just
what proportion of applications are embellished. But she finds at least
one bogus résumé in each search she makes, including, alas,
a Northeastern grad's. This student tried to pass off co-op stints-at the
Globe yet!-as two years' full-time experience. Gillespie was outraged.
"Co-op worked for me, but don't make it what it's not. I was very
disappointed to see an N.U. alumnus doing this. I told her I wouldn't talk
to her, and I told her why."
She tells fledgling job-seekers that experience-escalation
is both useless and sleazy. "The younger the applicant, the more important
it is for career counselors to tell them that they are applying for entry-level
positions because of what they are, not what they pretend to be."
With politicians, though, pretending ain't career-ending.
Red-baiting senator Joe McCarthy's "war wound" came in a shipboard
scuffle. The higher Lyndon Johnson climbed, the closer his ancestor came
to a Texas battle fought before he'd been born. Of course, the Oscar for
best performance in the Life Imitates Art category goes to Ronald Reagan.
Moist-eyed, he recalled his horror at seeing wartime atrocities firsthand.
He'd viewed them, all right-in a Hollywood screening room.
Incredible as it may seem, even such a paragon
of virtue as Linda Tripp has expunged a spot of bother. It seems that Monica
Lewinsky's great and good friend omitted a grand-larceny arrest from a
Pentagon security clearance. Say it ain't so, Linda!
What if you claim you're the inspiration for a
fake hero? That's what happened when Al Gore implied he was the model for
Love Story's preppie jock. Author Erich Segal replied that Gore's life
furnished only one facet of the character: rich, with a controlling father.
A red-faced Gore retracted.
But exaggeration isn't always having to say you're
sorry. Not if you don't get caught. One ex-secretary happily brags about
parlaying her menial post into a $70,000-a-year marketing job by claiming
she helped prepare the proposals she only collated. Her rationale: she's
excelling at the duties she alleged she'd been doing all along.
And contrary to the beliefs that time wounds all
heels and that deception eventually trips you up, some even crow publicly
about their career cosmeticizing. Hollywood mogul David Geffen often tells
how, after dropping out of two colleges, he faked a UCLA sheepskin to keep
his mailroom job at a talent agency. Eric Greenberg, director of management
studies at the American Management Association, has boasted that he once
carried six business cards, each with a different job title. His philosophy:
whatever gets you in the door. If someone dissed him as the public relations
person, he'd instantly become the vice president of marketing.
Just wondering: is director of management studies
his real title?
Journalism professor Bill Kirtz, a Pulitzer
Prizewinning columnist, writes regularly for Time, the Times, the
New York Times, and Northeastern University Alumni Magazine. He's often mistaken
for John F. Kennedy Jr.
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