The 7 Shocking Truths about Candidate Resumes

Did you know that a recent survey of 4000 employers in Singapore revealed that virtually all of them (99%) say they have between 10% to 50% bad hires in their organization?

What this means is that if an organisation has 10 employees, it may have between 1 and 5 employees who are not performing to expectations.

Now that is a staggering number of bad hires by any stretch of the imagination!

So if you are a HR Professional or a Hiring Manager and you conduct job interviews, you should be concerned!

The big question that we should be asking ourselves is “WHY? Why do organizations end up with so many bad hires?”

The 7 Shocking Truths

To get an idea of why so many organizations end up with so many bad hires, perhaps we should look at the following 7 shocking truths about candidate Resumes:

46% of resumes include discrepancies in job candidate’s employment and educational histories
40% of executives lie about their education
35% lie about accomplishments or job missions
53% of all job applications contain inaccurate information
34% of all applications contain outright lies about experience, education, and ability to perform essential functions on the job
9% of job applicants listed false employers, or identified jobs that didn’t exist
11% of job applicants misrepresented why they left a former employer

Other surveys have also uncovered similar patterns of deception. For instance:

53% of all job applications contain inaccurate information
34% of all applications contain outright lies about experience, education, and ability to perform essential functions on the job

(Sources: March 8, 2014 The Daily Stats by Harvard Business Review; www.hireright.com)

Some have commented that these statistics are mostly US-based statistics and questioned if these numbers apply here in our Asian context.

Unfortunately, we do not have similar statistics here for the Asian region (well, at least I have not found any so far. So if anyone reading this knows where to find these Asian-centric statistics, please let me know!). But I would boldly venture to state that if we were to do a similar study or survey here in the Asian region, the results wouldn’t be very far off.

Endless Resources

In addition, I was browsing in a bookstore recently and came across an entire shelf of these books:

I also did a search on Google on “Answers to tough interview questions” and Google returned over 10,000,000 hits!

What this means is that candidates today have an enormous amount of resources they can fall back on in order to get themselves fully prepared for job interviews.

With such odds stacked up against HR Professionals and Hiring Managers, it is therefore not surprising that your chances of hiring the wrong candidates are so high!

Now the BIGGER question is: How do you minimize the risk of hiring the wrong candidates?

Are there any ways you could mitigate the risk of hiring the wrong person and minimize the number of bad hires in your organization?

The onus is on us hiring managers and HR professionals – who act as the Gatekeepers of our organisations – to weed out the wheat from the chaff. However the sad fact is that most of us hiring managers and HR professionals who shoulder this heavy responsibility as Gatekeepers are not trained in effective interviewing and selection techniques.

What do you think? What can hiring managers and HR professionals do so that we don’t end up hiring the wrong candidates?

Learn how to hire the right people every time, avoid the mistakes most interviewers make, maximise employee engagement levels, lead and manage your employees to peak performance, minimise attrition rate, and so much more…

PLUS: Receive a free sample chapter on How to Craft Effective Interview Questions from my yet-to-be-released book How to Hire the Right People Every Time: The Executive’s Guide to Getting It Right

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