Bogus Resumes and Scott Thompson of Yahoo!
Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo!, has a computer science college degree listed that he never received (It was accounting). Another leader at Yahoo! has a degree that she got but in a different major. See the whole story here
So if a relatively honest and even naive America can have falsehood in resumes, then how do you feel resume falsification looks in China, a land where fakes are so common.
We have seen enough in our work to say that 80 out of 100 40 year old leader resumes have material falsehood. The percentage is very high indeed.
So it puzzles me why leaders still seek to fill their companies with people who have perfect resumes. Naturally, this just encourages more falsification. Everyone feels required to have a perfect resume, and so they appear.
Agreed? So behavior modification needs to occur in hiring. We need to look for the person for each position who will best help the company grow from that position. We need to attack the naysayers who attack if people have some apparent lack in their resume. We need to disarm them. A guy fails in his position and people say it is because he did not have an engineering degree and that should have been assured. The leader does not fail because he does not have a certain degree, but rather because of his own leadership gap or the lack of support he got from the home office. Scott Thompson is no less a leader because he has an accounting degree. He is less of a leader if we learn that he consistently alters facts when under pressure or cannot admit his falsehoods.
We need to avoid pushing job seekers into needing perfect resumes. It is self defeating to do so. Especially in China, we get the tricky people in our business when we do that.