It isn’t always clear what the exact number is, but more than 50% of jobseekers lie on embellish their resume. Forbes offers up an article titled Overachievement Without Achievement that contains a picture of Milli Vanilli. How perfect is that? The article quotes 53% as the number of people who lie on embellish their resume.
But check this out:
Some college students are encouraged to embellish items on their résumés. “They are taught to use the highest-level verb,” says Nancy Davis, a psychology professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. For instance, an intern who ran copies of an instruction manual might say he “created” the manual on his résumé, Davis says.
But the step from résumé embellishment to outright faking isn’t a long one. Awareness of résumé cooking could make job applicants feel they must push the envelope on their application, if only because everyone else is doing it (a frame of thought psychologists call false consensus).
“Highest-level verb” is a phrase for which I am not familiar, but it explains much. My layman’s term for it was attempting to use the Queen’s English to sound smarter. Of course, this approach can easily backfire with improper usage of unfamiliar words.