Oh, there are so many things you can do and know. Excel spreadsheets? Flawless. French? Bien sûr, business fluent. Many years of experience in customer service? What else? All skills that look good on your CV and that you can use to spruce up your own application to create the perfect self-presentation.
Okay, actually every Excel command has to be painstakingly searched for on Google, with your knowledge of French you can only order a baguette, of course there was never enough for Sartre and Beauvoir. And yet many people are not afraid to invent entire parts of their CV. Because that’s what a study by the portal said CVapp.de already impressively confirmed in May 2023: Almost 60 percent of the 3,000 Germans surveyed said at the time that they had lied when writing their CV. The data situation has hardly changed since then. The only question is: why do people do this? And how?
According to the study, those surveyed were particularly fond of cheating on their own knowledge and skills. Almost 80 percent of the study participants had already provided incorrect information in this area. Shortly behind were false statements about previous salaries at almost 74 percent, closely followed by fake job titles. And Germans are not alone in their penchant for imaginative CVs. One Study from the USA came to similar results last year. Seven out of ten people said they had improved their own life at least once. Over 35 percent of those surveyed even reported lying regularly on their resume.
Sounds like a risky strategy? It is. Even if many people still believe that a little bit of cheating can’t be that dangerous when so many other people do it too. Anna Lüttgen from the recruitment company Hays says: It’s actually quite dangerous. “You have to differentiate between resume cosmetics and serious false statements,” she says. But “deliberate deception on the part of the employer can result in dismissal without notice.” But what are “serious false statements”? If someone glosses over their grades or invents school and university qualifications, then that’s pretty serious. Language skills shouldn’t be invented either, says Lüttgen. So if you can only order a croissant, you shouldn’t be recommended for the managerial job at the company’s headquarters in Paris. Because even if you could get away with it once, things would be pretty embarrassing by the first day of work at the latest.
“Lies on your CV are a no-go,” says Linda Binder, spokeswoman for the personnel service provider Adecco. But men in particular tend to embellish their own skills a little too much or apply for jobs that don’t really suit them. The boundaries between self-expression and lies? They are sometimes fluid.
But if you present yourself with self-confidence, you could definitely be successful in these times. “The labor shortage cannot be explained away,” confirms Binder. It often happens that companies hire applicants even though they do not actually have the necessary experience for the advertised position. If you want to save yourself the stress of the threat of termination, it’s best to tell the truth straight away. It may be that you still get the job – and a French course along with it.