Creative Writing: Resumes and Job Applications

Creative Writing: Resum s and Job Applications

There are few head coaching positions in the United States more prestigious than that of Notre Dame. Football legends have coached and played at Notre Dame—Knute Rockne, George Gipp, Ara Parseghian, Joe Montana, and Lou Holtz, to name a few. In 1924, the famed sportswriter Grantland Rice immortalized members of the team as "the Four Horsemen," in a story that has one of the great opening lines in all of journalism:

Outlined against a blue, gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again.

In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction, and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.

Even Hollywood has jumped on the Notre Dame bandwagon, memorializing the legend of George "the Gipper" Gipp (played by former President Ronald Reagan) in Knute Rockne All American (1940) and the inspirational story of long-time benchwarmer Rudy Ruettiger in the 1993 film Rudy.

It was with no small fanfare, then, that in December 2001, Notre Dame announced the selection of George O'Leary, the head coach at Georgia Tech, as the next head coach for the Fighting Irish. O'Leary resigned his Georgia Tech position and participated in a glowing press conference in South Bend, Indiana. Within five days, however, he had sacked himself, leaving Notre Dame scrambling to find a replacement.

This abrupt reversal stemmed from an increasingly common problem: Some of the information on O'Leary's resum turned out to be inaccurate. The biographical information handed out by Notre Dame listed him as a three-year letterman at the University of New Hampshire and the holder of a master's degree in education from New York University at Stony Brook. But when Jim Fennell, a reporter for the Concord, New Hampshire Union Leader & Sunday News, began to follow up on the local angle of a UNH player hitting the big time, he discovered that the former UNH coaches and players he interviewed did not remember O'Leary.

Fennell then learned that O'Leary had transferred to UNH for his last two years, that he had not played in any football games, and that he had not earned any varsity letters. When other reporters began checking items on O'Leary's resume, it turned out that he had also not received a master's degree from Stony Brook. As the information became public, O'Leary resigned as Notre Dame's head coach.

While most of us do not have to worry about inquisitive reporters checking on our employment history, it should come as no surprise that employers and their human resource departments have caught on to the fact that not everything on a resum is necessarily the entire truth. Even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, nearly 70 percent of all employers were doing some sort of check to verify the information provided on applications or resum s. Since then, both the number of employers doing background checks and the scope of those checks has increased appreciably. ^[2]

In a tough job market, it's probably not surprising that applicants often take a little creative license with their work history. According to The Risk Advisory Group (TRAG), a London-based employee screening firm, over 50 percent of the resum s that they examined in 2001 had some type of error or exaggeration. The statistics for the United States are even worse: Hire-Right, an Internet-based background checking company, found that 80 percent of the 200,000 resum s they reviewed in 2001 were misleading in one or more ways:

• One in five listed fraudulent degrees.

• One in three contained inaccurate dates for previous employment.

• Two in five gave salary histories that were inflated.

• One in three had fictional or overblown job descriptions.

• Roughly one in four provided false references. ^[3]

What is a little surprising is the willingness of applicants and employees to take these kinds of risks, particularly in an era of nearly instant communication, online databases, and increasingly skeptical employers.

The consequences of false information on a resum are predictably harsh. Of the firms interviewed by the The New York Times's job market research team, 79 percent said that their policy is to terminate employees who are found to have falsified information on a resum (and presumably, the percentage that decline to hire people with fraudulent resum s is even higher). The second-most common response, some form of internal discipline of the employee, was the policy of only 7 percent of the firms interviewed. ^[4]

Verifying the information that job applicants provide about themselves is obviously not much of an invasion of privacy. After all, if you're providing information to a prospective employer in an effort to get a job, the employer has a virtually unassailable right to make sure that the information you've provided is correct. If you tell a potential employer that you are a graduate of the Wharton School of Economics or have an advanced engineering degree from MIT, it's simple common sense for the employer to pick up the phone and make sure that you actually got a degree.

If that were all employers did, there would be far fewer privacy concerns for prospective employees. But few employers these days are satisfied with simply verifying the information you give them. Instead, they are increasingly motivated to obtain as much information about you as they can. And to do that, employers are turning to the private detective industry, which is happy to provide employers with as much help as they need (and can afford).

^[2]Susan Bowles, "Background checks: Beware and be prepared," USA Today Careers Network (April 10, 2002).

^[3]Sally Richards, "Resume Fraud: Don't Lie to Get That Job!," www.hightechcareers.com, downloaded on 23 July 2002 from www.hightechcareers.com/doc699/nextstep699.html.

^[4]"Resume Padding Is Common, According to New York Times," Business Wire (May 29, 2002).