When you list only the most relevant and recent jobs in your 25-year work history on your resume are your lying? What about changing your job title from Level IV Coordinator to something that better explains what you did? Is that fibbing?

If you see the resume for what it is, no. For a resume is a marketing tool with relevant information that supports your objective, positions you as someone with particular skills and experience and helps the reader understand your potential. It's not a complete history of your work and life.

But these days too many people cross the line between persuasive marketing and downright lying.

Lying on resumes is apparently on the rise, according to several surveys. A Knight-Ridder-Tribune Business News article reported that an on-line survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management determined that more than 60% of the 373 human resource professionals who responded found inaccuracies on resumes. Nearly half the respondents to a Korn/Ferry online survey said 44.7% of their 300 respondents said they believed resume fraud among executives is increasing.

What do they lie about? About 71% of the resumes misrepresent the number of years they've worked on a job, said Jeff Christian, chairman of the search firm Christian & Timbers in an interview on NPR's program, Talk of the Nation.

Next, they exaggerate accomplishments such as taking credit for something they didn't do or misrepresent the size of an organization they managed, he said.

Most often people fabricate reasons for leaving a previous job, according to the Korn/Ferry survey. (When I heard this I wondered why such information is even on the resume. It shouldn't be. Neither should there be anything about salary, which they also say is an area in which people don't tell the truth.)

In 2003 an employee screening firm in London reported that their research suggests lying on resumes is growing around the world, with the number of people who falsify information jumping 15% between 2001 and 2002, according to the Institute of Management & Administration.

Although lying has gone on before, why so much now? One dot-com refugee called the radio show to say he "added the number of users that I was assistant administrator for" and "bumped up my role in projects" because "when you have a wife and two kids, it's the law of the jungle out there."

"Most lying is pragmatic," offered Professor Leonard Saxe of Brandeis University, a guest on the program. The more situational pressure someone is under, the more apt they are to lie, he said. Sometimes people believe that everybody else is cheating. In the case of resumes, people may think that everybody else is inflating their background. So to be competitive, they have to do it as well.

But even when the job market has been different, countless people-from executives to sales representatives--have told me they worry about not having a bachelor's degree, being in a job too short of a time and not having enough experience and how that will look on their resume.

"I think employers share part of the responsibility for the problem," added Saxe, with requirements that are not directly related to the work. They also "see some blemish in a person's record and won't look any further. They put the pressure on people to create things, to shave what they've done."

It's not just resumes that get embellished. A filmmaker trying to raise money for his project wrote in his proposal that his film had secured an actress who had starred opposite Sigourney Weaver. As it turned out, this actor had six lines in the entire movie.

Whether stretching the truth or lying, it makes someone wonder what else you're not being up front about. Worse yet, if you've lied to get the job and an employer finds out, you risk losing the job you worked so hard to get.

© by Andrea Kay