Staffing companies ask to put fake experience: Ethical or Unethical

Question

For an entry level candidate, staffing/recruitment agencies ask to add fake experience which increase the probability of landing a job interview.

While this question is asked by many recruiter agents (who recruit for their clients), so that they can showcase the candidate to their clients as their clients want. However, as a prospective candidate, I feel it's unethical to put experience, of which I never had, on my CV.

Is there any general consensus as to whether such requests are indeed unethical?

Answer 1

You pretty much answer your own question:

However, as a candidate perspective, I feel it's unethical to put something on table as my experience which I never had.

This is true and you should stick to your own ethics. Don't put it on there. While it may help to get more interviews, the on-site recruiter or people you'll have the interview with should very quickly realise that you do not have the experience listed on your resume. That makes your chances of being hired very slim either way. And even if they'd hire you, you would probably not make it through your first month before they realise you're a "fraud" and lay you off anyway.

So other than pleasing the recruiter, there's really no upside to this.

Answer 2

Unethical. Super unethical.

While it may pad their stats, what they're actually doing is helping to place workers in jobs that are a bad fit and setting them up for failure.

It's unethical for a person to decide to pad their own resume in this way but at least I get it - they're trying to land a job and provide for their family. But when a staffing agency pushes it, it's about greed and nothing else. That's low. What they're doing is trying to fluff their stats so they can say something like, "We place 94% of candidates so if you're looking for a job, choose us!" Or, "98% of the companies that choose us hire a candidate within 2 weeks. Choose us!"

Doing so at the expense of both employers and employees is pretty low.

These agencies should be helping to find jobs that are a good fit for both the employee and the employer. That's their whole function. When they fail to do this, it hurts everyone involved.

Answer 3

In addition to what the others have said here:

When I am working with a recruiting company I always arrive at an interview with my OWN copy of my Resume (and usually five extras, because you never know who you meet with) and provide it to them immediately and say, "This is the Resume I am prepared to discuss, regardless of what you have received from my recruiting company."

In the past I have arrived at interviews to find out that some experience (I did not have) was added to a resume (without my knowledge) that was provided to the company I was interviewing with.

Unfortunately, there are LOTS of unethical recruiting companies out there, and even more unfortunately the best places to work at seem to utilize only the worst companies, so sometimes working with a less then scrupulous recruiting company is not an option. However, I have not been afraid to tell company's I am interviewing with that the recruiting company did/encouraged/said for me to lie in order to land a job. Otherwise the company would have no idea what was going on.

Answer 4

It seems super unethical to me and I would not touch them, but my experience is only in the US, I don't know if its common in other areas. I've had recruiters encourage me to reword sections or push me to include things I have minimal experience with, but never to just lie.

It's also very dangerous for you. If you put experience with software "ABC" on your resume and they expect you to be productive immediately with ABC, you may find you don't have that job very long.

It seems dangerous for the recruiter too. Most interviewers aren't dumb, they will be able to figure out if you are BSing about your experience. If I'm a recruiter and I send 5 people into interviews with false experience, I wouldn't expect to keep that client long.

Answer 5

I feel it's unethical to put experience, of which I never had, on my CV.

Is there any general consensus as to whether such requests are indeed unethical?

I agree that it is completely unethical to lie on your CV and during interviews. Additionally, I would never work with a staffing company that wanted me to lie.

As a hiring manager, I never hire people who lie.

My career and my reputation are very important to me. I'd never let someone ruin it.

Answer 6

Of course this is super unethical and you should never do it for that reason.

I wanted to add though that ethics aside this is still a very bad idea. What happens when the company does a background check and finds out that your fabricated experience is, well, fabricated? At best they rescind the job offer, at worst they do harm to your reputation.

Answer 7

The rest of the answers are clear. Yes it is unethical. But please allow me to take it another step further.

It is not good for you!

Here is a real example. I had temporarily joined in on a project in the very earliest years of the World Wide Web as an expert for which I was at the time. I had started back writing router code for what was to become the Internet back in the day and had spent a lot of time working with various Internet services such as the web and e-mail as well as for other products and competing networks. I was, at that time, uniquely qualified and had worked on many products and protocols and could do just about anything that was possible including writing protocol stacks and products specifically designed for a given purpose.

I found out within first one or two days that the government contracting company had modified my resume and presented me as an expert on a particular e-mail product for which I was indeed familiar. The promise was that I would be able to resolve a particular problem. The resume and promise was based upon a lie that I had no knowledge of. I got into the meeting and realized that the problem to be resolved was a well known bug that the e-mail software company was aware of and was resolving in the next major release due in a few months.

My dilemma was that there was no work-around for the bug, and that I was not able to modify the code directly. I was a systems internal engineer and could certainly reverse engineer the compiled code, make the modification, and recompile a working product, however, that would be illegal and take significant time. The contracting company promised that the problem would be fixed by Friday a timeline that was not only arbitrary, but also impossible. They made this promise to gain unique access to the contract. No other company was understandably willing to take on such an effort and excluded that portion of the work from their contract negotiation with a caveat as to the reasons why.

This not only put me in an impossible position, it also painted my in an ethical corner. After the meeting, I met with the contractor who hired me and stated that the promise was impossible to keep especially within the promised time-line. The company said do it anyway. I then went to the customer, Walter Reed Medical Hospital, whose care is critical to wounded veterans of war, and explained that what was promised was impossible. They appreciated my honesty and pushed back on the contracting company within minutes. During the fallout, I resigned and went home.

I called a lawyer immediately. Why? Because this was a major hit to my outstanding reputation. Afterall, I had full and complete access to Bell Labs, Dec Labs, and was a consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, the Bell Corporation (the split into regional Bells with a parent company), Wang, IBM, Unisys, and many others supplying the government with critical services for which I was often called. One bad word about an individual would stop my ability to gain access to contracts forever and this was just a case that could do it.

In the end, my reputation did take a knock for being associated with the unethical misconduct anyway regardless of my innocence and lack of involvement. Why? Because this quickly became a fraud case for which I had to testify. I was able to regain my reputation once the fraud case was settled and I was able to present evidence of my innocence to the many who asked. And believe me, they all asked for about a year or so. This knocked me out of an entire industry for nearly two years. All well and good. I still had the trust of Digital and Bell who kept me very busy serving their customers and found a new niche anyway. That was the last of my government contracting and I never looked back.

I was lucky. Others may not have been. I have seen fraudulent contractor resumes float around all over the place painting the poor individual into a corner of explaining what happened. Some companies understand, most do not. The trust has been broken before you even arrived and you had no idea. Instead of a hopeful job interview, you walk into a difficult situation that you did not create. And believe me, this can last years!

My General Advice

Never walk into a situation unless you know you can 100% succeed. Know the environment, know the problems to be resolved (and there are always problems to be resolved), know that you have the skills to help without reservation, and know the ethics of anyone you deal with to the best of your ability. Trust is a major commodity within the IT industry and likely others too. Without trust going both ways, you can never have a rewarding and successful career. Trust me on that!

Answer 8

If you have 12 years and 6 months of experience in a field and round it to 13 is it unethical? Say you have 12 years 11 months 30 days 719 minutes and 59 seconds of experience is it unethical to call it 13 years?

I think this is an interesting notion. Fundamentally, what seems to be unethical is the misrepresentation of skills and experience the applicant does not have. I agree that this wrong. But it does beg the question what constitutes a "misrepresentation".

Consider an applicant put Microsoft Office on their resume.

Does this mean the person knows every application in the Professional Suite? And from which year? It has expanded quite a bit over the last few releases and knowing Word 2010 is not the same as knowing Word 2016.

Now while I agree with the premise that submitting an application that knowingly contains false information is wrong. However, what if that was not the intent? It was merely an oversight or even a failure to fully understand how the skills on your resume are being interpreted.

My point is there is always the chance that your understanding of the job requirements don't mesh with the employers. This is something you cant really know til you sit down and speak with them. Then it becomes a question of whether or not you can back up with evidence and for somethings like years experience this will be easy but for software skills not as much. Until you can form a common language with the employer there is no way to know if you would qualify by their standards in terms of knowing something well enough to say you know it.

In the end, I would just say be as honest as you can, don't put anything on your resume you cant speak to and represent yourself as best you can.

Answer 9

Asking for experience is often a fake requirement. For example, it's not uncommon for a company to ask for more years of experience than a certain field has existed (eg. "12 years of experience in developing iPhone apps" even though the iPhone has only existed 10 years).