Last year, we posted a story about a man, Adam Wheeler, who faked his way in to Harvard University by falsifying his student application.  He claimed that he had attended an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Harvard actually admitted him and was publicly embarrassed when the truth came out.

Wheeler was charged criminally in the matter, convicted and sentenced to two and a half years in prison and 10 years of probation.  He served 1 month prior to his trial and was released thereafter.

Well, according to CBSNews Wheeler is back at it again.  This time, he is looking for a job and indicated on his resume that he graduated from Harvard.  This was a violation of the terms of his probation and he’s now back in the slammer.

I know I’m not supposed to have a sense of humor about these things, but this is funny.  The truth is, if Wheeler was smart enough to fake his way into Harvard, conceivably, he might have been smart enough to get in on his own merits. I guess he didn’t take the school’s motto, Veritas (which means truth) very seriously.

Now back to serious.  Make sure you conduct education verifications and employment verifications before you hire someone.  People lie.  It happens all the time.  Performing these searches is your greatest tool for highlighting resume lies.

Check out Wheeler’s story below.

We’ve just posted a guest article on EmployeeScreen University about the efficacy of resumes in today’s marketplace authored by Kevin W. Grossman, Chief Marketplace Evangelist at Fisher Vista, LLC and HRmarketer.com Check it out.

Okay, it’s not dead yet, but I want it to die.

I understand that there’s still a huge part of the career management industry keeping it alive, making it better and making it work for you, the job seeker. To all my friends in this industry, please forgive me, as I also understand it’s probably not going anywhere for years to come.

But I still want the painfully ubiquitous resume to die a horrible death.

Why? Because it’s a self-serving piece of inconsistently formatted and fudged professional drivel that really doesn’t help me hire true quality of fit. Just ask any background screening firm that does employment and education verifications. For example, EmployeeScreenIQ’s research yields a 52% discrepancy rate between what an applicant claims about their education and work experience and what they find when they verify such information.

Fifty-two percent. Sure, the resume helps me sift and sort to the short list, but a short list that’s almost half fabrication on the average. And if you as the job seeker take that risk and blatantly lie or embellish on your resume, and my background screening firm uncovers it, you are out of luck at a time of high unemployment where you really need a little luck.

Yes, embellishing the truth is fabrication. It doesn’t make it any better than an outright lie, especially if you’re telling me you’ve been programming native iPhone apps for the past six months and you really only took an online course six months ago and made one farting app, one that isn’t very good anyway because it sounds like a Yorkshire Terrier barking.

So what then do we put instead of this black magic resume full of lies and deceit?

Your professional online profile, of course. Like the one you better have completely up to date on LinkedIn, where thousands of recruiting professionals are scouring and sourcing every day. (And I’m not even talking about the majority of recruiting pros who search for online information about you across the internet and other social networks.) And by the way, much of the same advice you may get about building your resume applies to the online profile as well.

However, I get the fact that anybody can fudge an online profile just as well as they can a resume. But, there’s a peer pressure element of keeping one another honest in an online community where your professional history is available to everyone you’re connected with, many of whom you‘ve worked with or for at one time, if not currently, as well as the portion that’s available for public consumption if you so choose.

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Our U.K. strategic partner, Verifile Ltd. has published their 2011 report on diploma and accreditation mill activity and reveals an astounding 48% increase worldwide in the number of known diploma and accreditation mills in the past year alone. As the Internet is the primary home for these bogus education and accreditation providers, little action is taken to stop them from helping unscrupulous candidates deceive unsuspecting employers. This year’s Accredibase™ report examines the current status of the diploma mill situation and considers what can be done to protect the public and businesses.

The Accredibase™ report identifies the following red flags that may help in the identification of diploma mills*:

• The institution does not have authority to operate or grant degrees from the education authorities where it claims to be based.
• Degrees are delivered in a very short space of time – sometimes just a few days.
• Degrees are granted based entirely on work or life experience.
• Contact details are limited to an email address and the institution is vague about its location.
• The institution will allow the student to choose his/her own course title and specify the graduation year to appear on the certificate.
• Sample certificates, transcripts or verification letters are available to view on the website.
• Institutions make over-complicated or misleading claims about accreditation or recognition.
• The institution’s name is similar to that of a recognised and respected education institution.
• Internet domain names are misleading – such as ‘.ac’ instead of the regulated ‘.ac.uk’ used by higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.
• The website is poorly designed, has poor spelling and grammar or it plagiarises copy from other institutions.

Verifile’s proprietary database of diploma and accreditation mills, Accredibase™, keeps track of the credential fraud industry. Verifile’s Accredibase™ has identified approximately 5000 suspect educational institutions and accreditors, including 2,615 known bogus education and accreditation providers. In addition to the huge number of confirmed mills known to Accredibase™, new suspect institutions are discovered on a daily basis – more than 2,000 are currently under investigation by Accredibase™ for inclusion in the database.

Download the full report

Somebody didn’t do their homework…

A London man was able to gain employment as the Deputy CEO of a Middle Eastern bank after a headhunting firm located his fictitious resume online.  His resume claimed degrees from both Harvard and Oxford as well as long term employment at one of the world’s top financial institutions – J.P. Morgan.  The headhunters forwarded the resume to their client who promptly interviewed and hired the fraudster.  It was only after they had flown him to the Middle East to meet their wealthiest clients that they discovered his lies.

A few simple inquiries into this person’s past prior to a job offer would have saved this bank a little bit of money and a lot of embarrassment.

Fraudster conned his way to top bank job

A conman used a fake CV to trick his way into becoming the £165,000-a-year deputy chief executive of a City investment bank, a court heard.

By Paul Cheston, Courts Correspondent – London Evening Standard – 1/31/2011

Peter Gwinnell, 49, posted a résumé online which claimed he had degrees from Oxford and Harvard and had worked for JP Morgan for 20 years.

The fake was enough to convince City headhunters Connaught Partners to put him in touch with Ahli United Bank, which was looking for a new deputy chief executive, in the autumn of 2009. Gwinnell played the role of senior banker so well that after two interviews he was appointed to the job.

He worked for a month, flying out to the Middle East several times to meet wealthy clients and collecting £14,500 in salary. It was only when Ahli ran extra checks that it realised Gwinnell’s story was a lie.

In reality he was a convicted conman who had served six months in prison in the Nineties and had not attended either university, or worked at JP Morgan. Gwinnell, of Harrow, admitted a single count of fraud and was handed a 50-week prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, at Southwark crown court. Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC spared him an immediate jail term after hearing he had already spent 12 weeks in custody on remand, and was suffering from serious depression.

The judge instead ordered Gwinnell to complete 100 hours of unpaid work, 18 months of supervision with a probation officer and to continue to undergo treatment for his depression.

He also banned him from uploading a CV onto the internet without the court’s permission. Sentencing, he told Gwinnell: “Somehow or other you managed to convince Connaught Partners that you were a suitable candidate for employment by the bank.

“This offence was deliberately planned, and it caused loss, but also no doubt much trouble and aggravation, and quite obviously embarrassment to the bank who determined that you were suitable for employment.”

The court heard that even after Gwinnell was questioned by police, he sent a fraudulent CV to a Swiss bank before withdrawing the job application.

Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of one of my favorite books, Freakonomics suggests that more than 50 percent of people lie on their resumes.  We obviously agree since our statistics show year after year that over 55% of applicants lie about their job and educational history.  Levitt refers to a famous W. C. Fields quote “Anything worth winning is worth cheating for.” Resume lies continue at an even higher rate in this economy, candidates have more reason to lie now, they need to work!  Falsifying your resume will get you nowhere.  Its rare to find a company these days that don’t conduct background checks on their applicants.  If you lie, you will get caught.  Employers will check your references, past employment and education, in addition to a thorough criminal background check.  What do we advise? Tell the truth!

Monster.com just published a great article, “Lying on Your Resume: What Are the Consequences?” In it they surmise:

Companies are growing increasingly savvy in ferreting out resume cheaters through more comprehensive background checks conducted both pre  and posthire. Why the latter? Subpar job performance can prompt a follow-up investigation into an employee’s past. If dishonesty is discovered, it is often grounds for termination and possibly legal action.

Click here for the rest of the article!

I typically don’t comment on content I read in online forums, but I saw this post on WallStreetOasis.com about a recent college grad who has accepted a position with Goldman Sachs, but must first submit to an employment background check before it’s official.  Unfortunately, he/she now realized that they inadvertently lied on their resume and is trying to decide whether to come clean prior to the background check. See below.

I’m so worried about it and haven’t been able to sleep well…

Here’s my advice.  Whether Goldman Sachs actually checks this information or not (and I’m quite certain they do) is immaterial.  This oversight on your resume is simply that until you realize it is false.  My recommendation would be to come clean and let them know the truth.  This is nothing more than a technicality and can be explained by addressing it ahead of time.  If they conduct the background check and find out otherwise, your oversight becomes a lie.  And even if that particular distinction would have no bearing on your employment prospects, the lie speaks volumes.

Just my two cents.

I really didn’t mean for this title to rhyme, sorry!   Two great articles caught my attention this morning on resume lies!  One will really make job seekers sweat because in the end the employee had to pay wages back to his employer.  The other captures the essence of one of my favorite books; Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt.  The themes in both are the same, a lot of people lie on their resumes, many get caught and the penalty could be huge.  Here is a wake-up call folks, a thorough background check is going to be done and your misdeeds will be uncovered!

First we have a “Doctor” who misrepresented himself to have not only a PhD but also a BSc and MSc. Are you kidding me? Didn’t he read our white paper on diploma mills and resume lies? Insead of lying at least he could have done a better job and bought a fake degree on the internet!!

“Doctor” Richard Clark applied to join Coopers Lybrand’s consulting practice in Ottawa to head its management section. Coopers required professionals to have university degrees. In a resume provided to the firm and later sent out to potential clients, Clark purported to hold a BSc, MSc and PhD.

Two years later, Coopers Lybrand learned he held none of these degrees and immediately fired him. He sued for wrongful dismissal. Not only did he lose the case, which proceeded to the Ontario Court of Appeal, but he had to reimburse the firm $47,000 for lost work when clients discovered Clark was not who he said he was.

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The second story kicks off with another war story.  Again, her employer began to do a bit of due-diligence and found out she had lied on her resume.

When a woman we’ll call Mary was offered a high-level student-services position at a prestigious college, she was thrilled to accept. But two years later, Mary was fired despite strong performance reviews and a reputation as a rising star at the college. The reason? She lied on her resume – and got caught.

An HR initiative requiring employees to furnish college transcripts revealed Mary lied about having a master’s degree. It wasn’t the lack of a degree that cost Mary her job; it was her dishonesty. Unemployed and with a blown reference to boot, Mary demonstrates what can happen when you lie on your resume.

In this article they use a lot of refernces to the book Freakonomics.  In it Levitt talks about how widespread resume lies are.  Levitt also refers to the W.C. Fields quote “Anything worth winning is worth cheating for.”

His examples and correlations couldn’t be more accurate.  In fact, as you will see below, his hypothesis on how many people lie is pretty accurate.  Maybe Steven Levitt has read our various studies on how many people lie on their resumes!

“The best lies will be those that mirror reality,” Levitt says. “My hunch is that the reputed 50 percent of resume cheaters are mostly making little cheats here and there, for instance, to cover up times when they were out of the labor force for six months.”

And what about the damage cheaters do to themselves? “Even if you are never caught, you will have to live in constant fear that someday you will be caught and punished and with the guilt of knowing what you did was wrong,” Levitt warns.

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Make no mistake, the use of diploma mills and other fake academic credentials is on the rise.  We recently highlighted this epidemic in our recent white paper, Smoke, Mirrors and Resumes: The Growing Threat of Diploma Mills (download your free copy here).  If the facts we presented weren’t enough, check out some of the real world examples shared by George Gollin, a board member of the U.S.-based Council for Higher Education Accreditation in a recent interview with CNN.

Among the examples cited in “Uncovering the Multi-Million Dollar Fake Degree Industry” are  the following:

• “According to a story in Wired Magazine, his interest turned to outrage after he stumbled upon news of a forensic psychologist who had purchased her degree. ‘Here’s this person who’s untrained doing therapeutic interventions,’he told Wired.”  “I thought, ‘Jesus, this is really bad.””
• “Gollin gave the example of one American who bought a Bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering, and who’s now working in the control room of a nuclear power plant.”
• “He also cited a U.S. degree mill that sells fake PhDs to real medical doctors for $10,000, and added that unqualified doctors have been jailed in the U.S. after attempting to practice medicine with a medical degree bought online.”

Read full article

It goes without saying that employers have to be ever-vigilant in their employment screening practices to ensure they have all the facts when it comes to hiring employees.

If you lie about your education credentials in the U.K., you’re not only out of the job – you’re going to court too!

An HR Manager re-applying for her position after a company re-organization was found to have falsified her academic accomplishments.  She had claimed to be in the process of a completing an HR training course, hold both a HRM degree and a marketing certificate from Oxford Brookes University as well as an advanced marketing certificate from Swindon College.  Turns out this wasn’t the case and she has now been given a six month suspended prison sentence, 150 hours of community service and is forced to pay £9,600 in compensation.

I’m guessing a thorough background check wasn’t conducted when she was hired which is why she was able to get away with her lies for the three years she worked for the company. 

This story teaches us two things:  First, it is important to screen ANY person that may work for your company – high and lower level positions.  Dishonesty isn’t exclusive to those with little to no work experience.  Second, continually screening your employees is vital to making sure they are keeping on the straight and narrow.  You never know what you may find the second time around!

HR manager sentenced for lying about qualifications

Employers reminded that risk of staff fraud can exist in all layers of management

By Claire Churchard, People Management – January 6, 2009   

Employers have been reminded of the risks of employment fraud after Kerrie Devine, an HR manager in Devon, was given a suspended prison sentence for lying about her qualifications.

Devine, a senior NHS human resources manager from Lympstone, was found guilty of lying about her qualifications to Devon Primary Care Trust (PCT) in the course of reapplying for a post after a reorganisation.

Devine was HR manager at East Devon PCT between 2003 and 2006, but when East Devon PCT was dissolved into newly-formed Devon PCT, staff were required to submit expressions of interest in new posts at Devon PCT.

Devine, who was on a lengthy period of sickness absence at the time, was found to have submitted a dishonest application in her expression of interest in March 2007.

She falsely claimed to be part way through a CIPD course and to hold a degree in HRM from Oxford Brookes University. She also falsely claimed to hold a certificate in marketing from the same university, and a Chartered Institute of Marketing advanced certificate from Swindon College.

Exeter Crown Court gave Devine a six-month suspended prison sentence and ordered her to pay £9,600 in compensation. She must also carry out 150 hours of community service. The investigation was carried out by the NHS Counter Fraud Service (CFS).

Debbie Lloyd, south-west operational fraud manager of the NHS CFS, said: “This positive outcome to our investigation is a reminder that fraud against the NHS can be committed by people in well-paid, senior positions.”

David Chernick, senior manager at KPMG Forensic and chairman of anti-fraud body PREFIT, added that the case also illustrated the value of secondary checks on people who had been employed for some time.

He said a second opportunity to check credentials often comes when there are changes to employment contracts. “I predict that many employers will find dishonesty the second time around.

“Credential checks are an important thing for HR to do and if they don’t carry them out then the security guys will increasingly have to take over the responsibility.”

Greg Allen, director of human resources and workforce development at NHS Devon, said: “We believe that the publicity surrounding the court case sends a clear message to people that if you defraud, or attempt to defraud the NHS, you will face the full force of the law.

“Kerrie [Devine] purported to give professional HR advice on the back of qualifications that she did not have. She also went out of her way to cover the tracks of her deception.

“No one should be in any doubt about the message. If you try to deceive the NHS you will be found out and dealt with appropriately.”

Hank Williams’ song line ‘one man’s famine, is another man’s feast’ has proven to be true with the economy in a down spin diploma mills and websites providing fake credentials for references to degrees are seeing rapid growth. It is estimated that there are as many as 3,000 such firms worldwide and more than 700 of them are in the US.

While diploma mills have been around for years a new development has been the emergence of firms providing fake experience certificates and references. This first came to light last year from a report issued by KPMG India. KPMG report revealed the existence of 150-250 such firms, often masquerading as information technology (IT) companies. KPMG India’s executive director Rohit Mahajan stated “There are some kind of set-ups that issue fraudulent experience certificates. We have identified almost 150 firms that are fictitious companies.” “During our background verification process for clients over the past one year, we found 250 firms that fake experience letters, salary slips and relieving letters to candidates,” added Abhay Aggarwal, chief executive of Integrity Verification Services Pvt. Ltd.

Jason Morris, CEO, EmployeeScreenIQ and Past President, NAPBS believes this is not a problem that is likely unique to India. He believes we see it there now because of the high concentration of BPO and Call Centers, but believes as other countries compete for this business we will see these fake experience providers show up there as well. Jason added, “It also is a business that desperation breeds because ‘people have to work’ so when there is a down turn or lack of opportunities people get creative in finding ways to get a job. When people are desperate they will take any means necessary to support themselves and their family.” Jason was prophetic with his comments because with the many of the economies of the world struggling and unemployment souring people are desperate for jobs and making desperate decisions.

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