Bruce Frassinelli bfrassinelli@ptd.net
Everybody Lies on Their Resume, Right? Employment resumes and the ‘Santos factor’
‘The truth is that lying on a resume happens a lot more than we might have thought. A survey several years ago found that about 80% of Americans have lied on their resumes, but just 21% were fired or disciplined after their falsehoods were discovered.’
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ewly elected Republican U.S. Rep. George Santos from Nassau County says that everyone lies on their employment resumes. Although he has the statistics to back up such a claim, he has taken resume lying to the extreme. Almost daily, there is a new disclosure that Santos did not do or achieve the things he claims when he sought votes from his constituents in 2022. Beyond that, he has denied some embarrassing events in his background even with pictorial proof to the contrary, including his denial of dressing in drag for a Brazilian festival when he lived there years ago. This flies in the face of his anti-gay stance put forward in the election and beyond. He then tried to pass off the episode as the actions of an over-exuberant youngster. The truth is that lying on a resume happens a lot more than we might have thought. A survey several years ago found that about 80% of Americans have lied on their resumes, but just 21% were fired or disciplined after their falsehoods were discovered.
BRUCE FRASSINELLI is the former publisher of The Palladium-Times. He served as a governor of the Rotary Club District 7150 (Central NY) from July 2001 to June 2002.
52 OSWEGO COUNTY BUSINESS FEBRUARY / MARCH 2023
Little white lies on a resume might not seem consequential when a person is applying for a low-ranking position, but if a person blossoms into a top company executive, these so-called little white lies could come back to haunt them and, possibly, lead to dismissal. As a publisher and editor of daily newspapers for 17 years of my 38-year career in journalism, I did my fair share of hiring (and some firing), and on a couple of those occasions the firings occurred because of falsified statements on resume that came to light after a reporter was on the job. Knowing that hiring the right person is one of the primary duties to keeping an organization humming along, I was brutal in fact-checking resumes, but sometimes previous employers given as references would confirm only that the employee worked there and the years employed. This told me next to nothing, so I had to use other devices to confirm important information. (I assure you they were all legal.) Some employees would from time to time embellish their resumes as opposed to
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