Identifying Fake Resumes

Hi

I recently wrote this on a yahoo group and I thought I this place is where it would help more people. So, read on, and let me know if this is helpful. I would also like to know if someone would want to add (or delete) something to this.

_____________

Here is out of my little experience in elimination. What I have

mentioned below are not rules of the logic of identifying fake

resumes, but a general observation where the probability of a fake

resume falling in the given category is very very high.

1) Absence of any personal details

- Date of Birth

- Passport Number

- Residence Address

2) Very stereotype mail addresses, eg., For the name Raghu Reddy, the

email address is something like [Login to view], or

[Login to view], which does not actually associate with a

person's name etc. (I use this email address of mine to stay

anonymous, something of that sort. Like manu_advice could be of

Manoj, Manish etc., and the person can switch identities, or evade

identification easily)

3) Only a first name is given. And if a seemingly full name is

given, it has a lot of initials (hence the chances that a RGB Reddy

having other resumes with the name Raghu GBR, Raghu Reddy GB, Raghu

Ganesha B R etc is very high.

Moreover, I have observed that if the combination of the above is

present, the chances that the candidate holds fake experience is

almost 95%. That is the reason why I started the mail with a

disclaimer because the 5% of the remaining candidates must not lose

out because of personal beliefs/assumptions.

Also observed, (in case of IT resumes), the names of clients

associated with projects would be very absurd or ambiguous. Such

as "State Bank, US", "VTC, Sweden" (A few names I found in Raghu's

resume)

*Not to miss out this part*, candidates of this sort would not

mention the name of the college they studied in, the branch they

specialized in, not the year they passed out, or completed their

course in, instead it would be,

" B.Tech from JNTU University, Hyderabad with an aggregate of

75%"

Also, you would notice that the percentage would tend to be rounded

figures.

If you would want to confirm this. Call the candidates, the

probability that the candidate would say "I am busy, call me after 1

hour" is almost 90%.

The litmus test:

To eliminate them (to confirm your doubts), have a few (2 or 3)

basic questions in their branch of studies, and also in the area

they claim expertise in, such as, in electronics, ask them

what 'noise' is. Ask what the logic behind a 'multivibrator' is and

where it is used in real life. Then ask them to tell you to explain

how a recursive function would work, and what the flow of logic is.

You may also ask questions like what the runtime memory allocation

table would look like etc.

After they have answered none of your questions, use your lively

imagination and ask them something really silly and hypothetical and

non-existent. If the candidate babbles out some answer, then you

have just confirmed that the candidate is a fake.

_________________________

Comments?

Dixit

Hi Dixit,
You have identified many of the possibilities. I would like to add one more....If there is a project on Hospital Mangement System .... no second thoughts....
Radhika

Oh! Well Radhika,
I did not even get into looking at the projects!! After the identifiers, I think one can blindly say that there would be a project in either, Hospital Mgmt., as you said, Library Mgmt, Inventory Mgmt (of any sort).
But I have noticed that fakers have turned to copy pasting most of their projects from actuals, or extremely well imagined ones (Unfortunately, I never had the 'guts' to ask a faker where he copied the projects from!).
PL&E
VND

250 views and just one input. I was hoping that I could write a manual on reducing interview time by eliminating fakers in the screening process itself!
Kindly contribute liberally!

Hi Dixit
In my expereince i had observed when candidates write in their CV like
worked with XYX company from Jan 1997- Jan 2000 and then again in the next company they write Jan2000 - jan2003
This kind of patterns when i had refrence checks most them were found to be fake .
Rgrds
Vinay
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/grou...ResourceOnLine

HI,
I think the best way to defeat all these persons who have fake papers with them is to have a background checking done for all the employees. We do this in our organisation.
We have engaged an external agency to do this check, where a check is done on all the criteria starting from date of birth, address & identity, education certificate and past experience. I also make it a point sometime during the interview to communicate to the candidate that we do this.
Also now most people are aware that we do the pre employment screening, so it kind of detracts people with fake certificates to apply to us
Thanks
Sherine

Hi Vindixit,

Interesting observations!! Though I have never been into the IT recruitment or recruitment per say.. i have a very bad habit of discussing Careers with who ever i meet. A lot of my school and college friends are in the filed of IT. This gives me access to professionals from the IT than any other field.

I should admit here in shame that most of them are on the fake experience.. All in best of the companies!!!

In the early days I used to be surprised and I would often challenge their survival in the industry. This I was sure because a person with no work experience, gets a job by showing 3 years work experience.. how would he survive. the difference between a person who is 1000 days old and the person who is new to my logic should be very large... how than industry is not able to identify a person who comes with a fake experience.

Let me take you through the steps on how this process works:

• The process starts with a friend in the industry who is ready to help another friend of his who is unemployed. This is one of the major sentiments I have come across which supports fake experience. They give the projects to the friends and then train them for quite some time.

• The second type would be the guys who make money of the knowledge they have. They sell the code they have. Not only the code of theirs but also the modules that their colleagues have worked on ( I don’t know how they manage to take it out of office).

• There will be a standard set of questions most often used by HR to eliminate fake candidates. Friends help them with the scripts to answer these questions. All permutations and combinations worked to be ready to face any question that would be asked by the HR.

• There is a serious preparation that happens on al the scripts being provided and then the candidate is ready to face interviews.

Then they happily face 20 - 30 interviews and the most desperate company would take them.

My read of the situation is that most of the cases we know that a wrong candidate is being recruited. We have our own deadlines to work and therefore this. The line managers would also go with this because they need resources to show to the client.

Interestingly one of friends shared with me that most of the resumes in the IT market today are fake only for a fact that the requirement for the experienced professionals has grown so huge that all the companies are on the recruitment spree and no one has laid of employees.. How can you generate people with experience all of a sudden.. This is a simple imbalance in the “demand and the supply” .

The candidate who is ok would survive.. the bad guys some times get thrown out ( 10 % chance) and they manage to get themselves a new job … all because of the market.

We did not try to find a permanent solution to the problem; instead we created a new problem now. This is what happens when we start looking for short cuts instead of working to find genuine solutions.

Regards

Srikanth Ch

Dear Dixit, I appreciate the observation that you do..and i too got some knowledge by looking at your article. but i want to know that some time the candidate while filling up the forms in the portals, some options will not be available. for example, if the candidate has done MSW(HR), there will be no potion for MSW. Instead there will be option for MBA. So during that time, it would be a little confusing for the candidate to fill the form.
So we cant conclude completely a resume is fake.. some times we have to give a second look, or clarification. which would be better..
Regards
Dan

Hi

Srikanth: Thanks for your inputs. It is very nice to see a non-recruitment person's opinions on the topic. Yes, indeed the inflow of business, and the shortage of good talent are the ones that are the cause of acceptance of applicants with fake credentials.

The purpose of listing this write-up was to understand what are, further, the means of identifying fake resumes and eliminating them at the beginning of the recruitment process, given the fact that even one round of technical interview is effectively a waste of one manhour of the technical person, and a lot more of effort from the recruiter or the HR coordinator etc. The purpose, also, was to enable the population of recruiters that do not have a technical background or understanding of technology become self-reliant, to a certain extent on doing a better job.

Sometimes, eliminating resumes on the ground level is not just saving time, but also a matter of ethics, meaning that there are ample openings for freshers in the industry to accomodate competent and qualified people, and generally, the people that resort to adding false credentials are the most incompetent in their respective batches(not implying to the college or university, but to the entire population of passouts of that particular year. This does not generalize anyone's competence level, but also highlights that values are at times equally important as one's abilities are, to fit into a prospective employers list of employees/associates.

Further, I would like to add on a note,

To Sherine: I have also recommended a lot of companies to add a thorough back-ground investigation for every hire made, in order to keep the company clean from malpractises (Instance: Hey dude! I got a job with XYZ by adding 2 years experience to my resume, I suggest that you do that too!!). But, the idea of identifying fake resumes at the beginning of the process of hiring would save the overhead hiring cost (of conducting background investigations[in case the candidate is through the technical assessment by the employer])

Also, a note,

To DanielMay30: This is about resumes, and not anything about portals etc. Moreover, these days the portals are mature enough, and have added plain text fields and options named 'others' in case a person in unable to list himself/herself in any category. My write-up is about identifying fakes in resumes using a very traditional pattern based approach rather than a generic or standard protocol. Also, I have mentioned in the article recommending not using the mentions as rules, but rather indicators to the probability of fake credentials being present in the resume, and also that

I mentioned this part to avoid:

Thats about it. Thanks for all your contributions and I hope there are more contributions to this thread!

Hello Everyone!



You have made some fine generalizations. However it may not be fair to shortlist on the basis of some assumptions alone. Here is why:-



1) Absence of any personal details

- Date of Birth

- Passport Number

- Residence Address



This could be because the person has moved and changed places a lot, because his/her parents were in a transferable job.

He had too move from one city to another due to personal reasons (like personal/parents ill health) and he does not have a place to stay.





2) Very stereotype mail addresses, eg., For the name Raghu Reddy, the

email address is something like manu_adviceyahoo.com

, or

raghuexpertgmail.com

, which does not actually associate with a

person's name etc. (I use this email address of mine to stay

anonymous, something of that sort. Like manu_advice could be of

Manoj, Manish etc., and the person can switch identities, or evade

identification easily)



This is true to a large extent. People who don't have professional ids cannot act professionally. We don't want them anyway.







3) Only a first name is given. And if a seemingly full name is

given, it has a lot of initials (hence the chances that a RGB Reddy

having other resumes with the name Raghu GBR, Raghu Reddy GB, Raghu

Ganesha B R etc is very high.



The example that you gave could be really a long name. We actually had a person who had a large name (7 sub names, with more than 60 characters. I know this fact because he was from our college.I cannot mention it here. I am sure one would not like to have it on top of your resume. It might actually reach two lines. God knows what will happen when you end up using fancy fonts and font size greater than 12.)

This can be largely affected by cultural influences and practices followed in a particular nation.







Also observed, (in case of IT resumes), the names of clients

associated with projects would be very absurd or ambiguous. Such

as "State Bank, US", "VTC, Sweden" (A few names I found in Raghu's

resume)



This is very true, however they can be verified with a little bit ground check. Background checking is a little risky mainly because the sources we rely upon may turn out to be unreliable.

For example:-



An ex-boss-This person may either die of guilt for firing the person or may be vindictive

A colleague-Usually turns out to be a friend from the organization. He/She has all the nice things to say about him/her.

This person may be trained or coached to say the right things





*Not to miss out this part*, candidates of this sort would not

mention the name of the college they studied in, the branch they

specialized in, not the year they passed out, or completed their

course in, instead it would be," B.Tech from JNTU University, Hyderabad with an aggregate of

75%"







Yes, it might be exactly true what you are saying, on the other hand it might be because the candidate is plain careless.





Also, you would notice that the percentage would tend to be rounded

figures.



This can happen because the candidate has actually, udermined his performance(i.e. rounded off 67.67% to 67%) or has prepared a standard format and is using it to apply to a lot of places, wherein they are asked please truncate the decimals.



If you would want to confirm this. Call the candidates, the

probability that the candidate would say "I am busy, call me after 1

hour" is almost 90%.



Another reason this may happen is that the boss has just come in and he/she does not want to take your call or be in a comfortable place/position to give an interview. The candidate may be discreetly searching for a job.







The litmus test:

To eliminate them (to confirm your doubts), have a few (2 or 3)

basic questions in their branch of studies, and also in the area

they claim expertise in, such as, in electronics, ask them

what 'noise' is. Ask what the logic behind a 'multivibrator' is and

where it is used in real life. Then ask them to tell you to explain

how a recursive function would work, and what the flow of logic is.

You may also ask questions like what the runtime memory allocation

table would look like etc.



Asking a couple of basic questions is a good idea.





After they have answered none of your questions, use your lively

imagination and ask them something really silly and hypothetical and

non-existent. If the candidate babbles out some answer, then you

have just confirmed that the candidate is a fake.



Your test fails, because what seems impossible to you may actually be possible(assuming that you have very limited knowledge about the subject).



Alternatively, it may mean that the candidate may think of somethings that are out of the box.



AT THE END OF THE DAY YOU MAY END UP LOOSING A GOOD CANDIDATE!



Regards,

Shyamali