There’s a balancing act you are going to play when you are in the job market. More than at any other time in your life, you’ve got to ensure that you are promoting yourself properly, and not in an unethical way. Instead, your CV and your in-person presentation must reinforce all that you do and have done in the employer’s area of interest. This must be done “straight,” without exaggeration and of course, fabrication.

Sadly, recruiters, hiring managers, and human resources (HR) staffers regularly uncover falsified claims and misinformation on resumes and CVs. There have always been a bald-faced few who fabricated details on their resumes—a degree added here, employment dates manipulated there—but their numbers weren’t large. Recruiting firms and professional background checkers were generally able to discover these flaws before that person went further in the process.

But now their numbers are getting larger. Today, more people than ever seem to be trying to perpetrate a bit of subterfuge just to get a foot in an employer’s door. Accomplishments are blown out of proportion, details are added, or, during interviews, stories are embellished, all in the name of seeming more hirable. It’s not clear why this is happening. Maybe it’s because the job search has become so much more competitive. Or, it might be that the number of high-profile examples including journalists and commentators has made people think lying has become routine.

Scientists, who really ought to know better, are generally not the blatant types with the falsified diplomas. But they can certainly be prone to exaggeration. After all, this isn’t rocket science. The best advice could hardly be simpler: Emphasize your strengths—you have to. Sell your credentials. But don’t make anything up, ever. In presenting your credentials just as in presenting your science, always be meticulously accurate. Always assume that even small misstatements will be uncovered.

Self-promotion as embellishment
Anyone can make a mistake, but that’s why we always check our work, right? Recently I was asked to write a biosketch. While reviewing it, I caught myself tying two career experiences together as if they happened one after the other. It really wasn’t intentional; at the time it felt like I was just trying to write in a more powerful way. But if it had gotten through in that form, it could have been embarrassing for me. What matters is that I read it with a critical eye. My mistake never made it to the outside world. 
What happens if a mistake does get through? Usually nothing—because most job applications aren’t looked at seriously.

Companies aren’t going to bother fact-checking a CV from a candidate they’re not interested in anyway. But the further along you get in the process—the closer you get to being hired—the more likely it becomes that your CV will find its way to a fact-checker. When that happens, your errors, intentional or not, will probably get caught. And if you get caught in an act of deception, or even exaggeration, you’ll immediately be out of contention for that job and potentially for others as well.

Here are some areas where people often make errors, not only on their CVs but also in interviews. I’ll start with the most egregious.
CV Infractions. The CV or resume is the place where the most outright fabrication shows up. Occasionally an applicant will fake a degree. More common is to tweak it a little. A biology degree with a chemical focus conveniently becomes a biochemistry degree when needed for a particular application. Feel free to emphasize the chemistry connection in the description of your work, but don’t even consider changing the degree field! It’s not worth it.

One of the easiest things to do is to fudge the dates to cover up a resume hole. If you left a job in 2013, it can be tempting to extend it into 2014 to cover a brief period of unemployment. More subtle still, you might be tempted to be imprecise in your employment dates, say, 2012 to 2014. When an HR person or contracted resource finds out that you left that job in January 2014, the employer may conclude that you’re trying to cover something up. It’s hardly unusual to be out of work for a few months—but why introduce the potential for suspicion, and a question from the employer that needs to be probed?

If you’ve got a problem-free record, be proud of that and show the full dates on every element of your CV. If you don’t, it’s best to be up-front about it. Brief periods of unemployment are common. Longer periods spent caring for young children or aging parents are common, too. Properly presented, such things will not pose much more than a moment or two of conversation, and often less.

Describing your accomplishments. In companies, people work on teams, so what your team accomplishes is what matters most. But your own credit must be established as well; interviewers need to understand your personal contributions to the team effort. In my seminars, I often describe an accomplishment using “we” in order to show my audience how the very academic “we” does little to help their case. For example, “In the Smith lab, we do work in the blah-blah field, and we’ve published in several high impact journals a series of papers showing that blah-blah and blah-blah are interrelated.”

If you are still using this academic “we” approach, make sure you also emphasize your own personal contributions. What was your role in that story? You may not have given it much thought up to now, so now’s the time, before you start interviewing. You don’t want your responses to seem canned, but you do need to be prepared to say what precisely you contributed to the effort—how “I” fits into “we.” So rehearse these stories and ensure they give an accurate account of your individual contributions and of what your team accomplished. Claiming credit for yourself doesn’t mean denying credit to the team. 

Name Dropping. Many of us are linked on social networks to hundreds or even thousands of other people, and your interviewers probably know some of them. If in the past you’ve worked with a leader in your field, that fact can help you get hired, especially with a good recommendation from that person. But a LinkedIn connection is not a real professional relationship. So be careful not even to imply a closer relationship than really exists. And don’t even bother mentioning a connection if you’ve never really worked with them. In this as in all things, be meticulously accurate in how you characterize your relationships. Name-droppers usually get caught, and it can be embarrassing.

Recently, I was offered an opportunity to recruit a VP who would work for a very well known general manager, and of course I knew the name of that GM and all about his background, as I’d tried to recruit him numerous times for other assignments. But my very mention of the fellow’s name led my HR contact to think that I was well acquainted personally with their GM. That was the wrong message to send, because to that fellow, I was just one of hundreds of headhunters he’d heard from over the years. Without knowing it, I sent the wrong signals. My lesson was to always clarify your relationship when you use a well-known person’s name in your interview.

Can this stand up to scrutiny?
Job seeking is tough. You have to promote yourself, but self-promotion is an art and unless you are a salesperson, we’re all just beginners. Many scientists tend to be bad at this, and they lean toward reticence and caution—but they sometimes overcompensate and go too far in the other direction. 

Instead, stick to what you know. Set aside your aversion to self-promotion, but retain your scientists’ commitment to data integrity even, or especially, when the data in question is about yourself. Be accurate in the written materials you submit, and be prepared to cast yourself in the most positive light in interviews—cautiously. Pull out examples that highlight both the “me” and the “we,” selling yourself as a talented hands-on expert and a dedicated team player. Integrity is a scientist’s most important asset, so show it off.