When does lying on your CV go too far? What is cheeky and what is frankly fraudulent

In theory, our CVs should be a straightforward reflection of our careers to date, listing jobs, qualifications, and any particularly important skills. Simple, right? But if the versions of ourselves laid out in these documents were to come to life, chances are we probably wouldn’t recognise them. Instead, they’d appear as awful Apprentice candidate doppelgangers, whose grandiose claims definitely wouldn’t pass a bulls**t detector test.

“Highly proficient” in Microsoft Excel? The last time you opened a spreadsheet was in a secondary school ICT suite running Windows 95. Can your rusty Spanish really be classed as business standard, unless your line of business involves ordering beers? And as for that “integral role in high-level negotiation”? Well, you sat in on a few Zoom calls. With your camera off. In silence. Somewhere along the line, getting a little bit, ahem, imaginative with your resumé became commonplace.

This month alone, two politicians have had their CVs in the spotlight. First, chancellor Rachel Reeves made headlines for all the wrong reasons after it emerged that her LinkedIn profile erroneously elongated her stint at the Bank of England by nine months (she’d previously been called out for claiming she’d worked as an economist at HBOS, when she was employed in retail banking instead). The profile has since been amended, and a spokesperson for Reeves blamed administrative errors made by her team. Then it was the turn of business secretary Jonathan Reynolds to come under fire. A biography on his old constituency website had previously referred to him as solicitor – despite the fact he’d never actually qualified. In an echo of the Reeves saga, Labour sources put it down to “human error from his office”.

High-profile cautionary tales like these can provoke head-shaking and schadenfreude. Yet who among us can raise their hands and honestly say they’ve never used a little bit of creative licence to prove that they are, say, a dynamic innovator who works well in a team? It’s not so much a lie as a slight rearrangement of the truth, or so we might tell ourselves. But venturing into these grey areas can take you down an “ethically slippery slope”, says future of work expert Lindsay Kohler, author of the upcoming book Dissenters: How Workplace Rebels Are Made. “Those smaller deceptions often lead to larger, more damaging ones.” And those can backfire in spectacular fashion.

What drives us to play fast and loose with the truth? “It’s really just a risk versus reward calculation,” Kohler says. When we weigh up whether or not to misrepresent ourselves on a job application, we are essentially “deciding if that added boost to the strength of a CV is worth the consequence if it gets found out”. In a crowded, competitive and often dispiriting job market, you can understand why some jobseekers might start to throw in a few superlatives or add a glossier spin to their achievements.

Plus, there’s a pervasive sense that everyone is at it, too. This leads to “people feeling like they need to overinflate” their experiences, or believing that “if you didn’t lie on your CV, you would never get anywhere”, says organisational psychologist Jennifer Dootson. Over the course of 18 years working in HR, she has spotted plenty of tall tales. When sifting through applications for technical IT roles, she saw candidates claiming that they’d “hacked into something that they shouldn’t have”, like governmental websites, “as a way of proving their technical prowess, as a badge of honour”. At least those bluffs might have been vaguely relevant for the gig, unlike when one memorable jobseeker declared that they’d been invited to Beyoncé’s birthday party, in a “fun fact” section of their profile.

Bizarre claims about celebrity bashes might seem pretty harmless, even irrelevant. But this Beyoncé bluff also falls under the umbrella of “unverifiable lies”, the sort of hard-to-check claims that many resort to in order to glam up their CVs. Changing the dates of your employment or your degree results are falsehoods that can be easily found out, if someone decides to do some digging. But if you boast about increasing productivity or engagement by some impressive percentage, that’s harder to check up on. “Organisations are just not equipped to provide you with verification about whether or not someone increased the revenue by 216 per cent,” Dootson says.

Inevitably, then, recruiters find that “a lot of energy goes into essentially separating fact from fiction”, says Duncan Smorfitt, market director at Robert Half recruitment agency. They become attuned to certain red flags that suggest liberal doses of creativity. A CV that “claims to have a bit of everything, where you’ve got people that have just listed millions of skills” probably indicates a “catch-all approach”, he adds. Lies about language abilities are also pretty common. “We’ve had candidates in the past who’ve claimed to be fluent in, say, Spanish or French. They get to the interview and the interviewer just starts speaking in that language.” It “quickly becomes apparent”, he says, that while they might have studied it for A-Level many years ago, they’re hardly bilingual.

Lindsay Kohler, future of work expert

Job titles that don’t seem to match up to an “inflated” string of achievements and responsibilities are another warning sign for Melissa Hewitt, head of HR outsource and screening at recruitment firm Morson. So is “vagueness” about the plans you’ve supposedly masterminded: think “sweeping statements about being really pivotal within specific projects, and then not being able to back that up”. In an interview, Hewitt says, she’d then try and “drill down into ‘how did you do that? What did that involve?’” Or she’d try and use her network to do a bit of fact-checking. “When you’re operating within a region or a specific sector, circles are small and people do speak to each other,” she says.

Therein lies the problem: lies have a habit of being found out. And when they do, “you’ve labelled yourself as dishonest at worst, or a little bit sloppy or inept at best”, says Smorfitt. Even if you are good at blagging, how long can you actually keep it up if you do land the job? If you’ve claimed that you boosted sales up to £2m at your last company, your new boss will probably expect you to do the same. “You’re going to find yourself very quickly in a situation where you’re falling short of expectations,” Smorfitt adds.

While fudging the truth on your CV is “not a specific legal offence”, knowingly providing false information in order to secure a job “could be considered fraud, which is a criminal offence”, explains Garvey Hanchard, partner at Bloomsbury Square Employment Law. Glorifying your role in particular projects could be “overlooked as matters of interpretation”, but “falsely claiming to hold a qualification never held” could not. Therefore, this is “much more likely to amount to fraud, of the sort that a prospective employer might be inclined to report, or in regulated industries, be required to report”.

Throughout his career, Hanchard has “come across many cases where job offers have been revoked as a result of an embellished CV, and several cases where employees have gone on to be dismissed either for having lied during the recruitment process, or for claiming skills that it was later discovered they did not have”. Even if an employee ends up performing well in a job they fibbed to secure, “they can still be at risk of dismissal for breach of trust”. In most cases, he adds, the employer would stop there, “and not pursue any legal action on top” – but “there are lots of examples where the employer went further”. There are certain regulated industries, like medicine or law, where the consequences might be especially serious.

So how can we make the most of our experience, without taking it too far? Career coach Jenny Holliday reckons that “the honesty element of a CV is a feeling in many ways – you know deep down when you’ve pushed something too far”. If a particular phrase or claim makes you feel a bit nervous when you see it in black and white, rethink it, because it’s likely that you’d crumble when pressed on it in an interview. Even flowery words like “passion” can be part of the slippery slope, Holliday says. “People say they’re passionate about something but I challenge them on whether they really are. It’s those kinds of worlds that can lead to what then feels like embellishment.”

Of course, she adds, “you need to make yourself stand out” from the rest, but it’s always worth asking yourself: “If I was challenged on this information in public, would I feel confident to say it’s true?”