Valley News

June 19, 2002

RESUMES CHECKED A LITTLE MORE CLOSELY

Reference-checking practices vary around the Upper Valley, but even the employers with the most stringent policies say resume fraud isn't a big problem.

Before Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center hires a physician, the center verifies every previous job and every transcript from every school and training program -- and it goes directly to the schools and training programs instead of relying on copies provided by applicants, according to Bill Geraghty, the center's vice president for human resources.

Even with that kind of scrutiny, Geraghty said the medical center hasn't encountered anything like what happened to Dartmouth College last week, when the newly hired athletic director resigned over a master's degree he listed but didn't have.

"It has happened to us (but) it's rare," says Holly Molinaro, vice president of human resources at Geographic Data Technology in Lebanon. GDT checks references and verifies the employment history of job applicants, but doesn't check their educational credentials. The largest segment of the company's almost 500 employees is hourly workers whose jobs don't necessarily require a college degree, Molinaro said.

At Timken Aerospace in Lebanon, questions have come up about resume information after someone was hired only three times in the last two years, according to says Nina Moore, the company's human resources manager.

"We've been fortunate," Moore said. Her company tells prospective employees that resume padding can be cause for termination, and the company checks all references -- even for their hourly employees. Engineers who deal with clients' proprietary information get extra scrutiny, as do applicants for any position that requires a specialized degree, she said.

Lindsey DeJong, a human resource specialist at Hypertherm in Lebanon, says she's seen educational credentials fail to check out twice in the four years she's been working in the field -- and both times were before she came to work for Hypertherm last year. Job offers at Hypertherm are contingent on references checking out, and the company usually calls colleges and previous employers, she said.

While a number of companies reserve detailed verification for those candidates who will be offered a job, a lot of intuitive checking goes on during the interview process.

"If they can't answer the questions we ask, we make the assumption that (the resume is) pretty padded," Moore said.

Studies show resume padding "goes on all the time," according to Chris Forman, senior director of strategic development at AIRS, a Hanover company that trains both recruiters and job seekers. One leading executive search firm, Christian & Timbers, found inaccuracies in 23 percent of a group of 7,000 resumes it checked, he said.

Other surveys report even higher numbers, including one published a couple of weeks ago by The New York Times Job Market that said 89 percent of job seekers and 49 percent of hiring managers believed that a significant number of job applicants falsify their resumes.

If you're a resume inflator, the chances of continuing to get away with it are getting slimmer, say Forman and others. The reason? Sept. 11 and the Internet.

"One of the things that we're very up-front about is that you need to be excruciatingly honest," Forman said. "The chances of you getting caught are higher. Lying on a resume is very short-sighted. It's going to catch up with you at some point."

Forman said the reference-checking and background-investigation business is up 30 percent since the attacks last fall, and when employers decide to start checking more, the expanding reach of the Internet makes that job ever easier.

People take risks with their resumes because they're afraid they won't get hired if they don't say they have the right degree, according to Dara Herbst, president of Certified Reference Checking Co. in O'Fallon, Mo. That fear increases in tight job markets like the current one, she said.

"Employers in general tend to not check backgrounds or references. They just go on people's word," said Donna Haskins of McIntosh Staffing Resources, a Dover, N.H., company that does reference checking and candidate interviewing for employers.

Michael Kessler, President & CEO of Kessler International, a forensic accounting and investigative consulting firm based in New York City, says high-profile news stories like the one coming out of Dartmouth last week don't have a lasting impact on company practices. 

"What we find is it happens in waves. When a news story breaks, everyone wants to check out their employees, then it peters off," he said.

In medicine, business or academia, what should someone with a problematic resume and a guilty conscience do?

Herbst's answer is simple and direct: "Come clean."

"Start from scratch and be honest. You're going to feel better about yourself knowing you didn't get by on false degrees," she said.