Identifying Fake Resumes
 

About me:

I am Vijay. I work as a recruiter for a product-based company for its development center at Bangalore.

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Here is out of my little experience in elimination. What I have mentioned below are not rules of the logic of identifying fake resumes, but a general observation where the probability of a fake resume falling in the given category is very very high.

1) Absence of personal details
- Date of Birth
- Passport Number
- Residence Address

2) Very sterotype mail addresses, eg., For the name Raghu Reddy, the email address is something like manu_advice@..., or raghuexpert@..., which does not actually associate with a person's name etc. (I use this email address of mine to stay anonymous, something of that sort. Like manu_advice could be of Manoj, Manish etc., and the person can switch identities, or evade identification easily)

3) Only a first name is given. And if a seemingly full name is
given, it has a lot of initials (hence the chances that a RGB Reddy having other resumes with the name Raghu GBR, Raghu Reddy GB, Raghu Ganesha B R etc is very high.

Moreover, I have observed that if the combination of the above is present, the chances that the candidate holds fake experience is almost 95%. That is the reason why I started the mail with a disclaimer because the 5% of the remaining candidates must not lose out because of personal beliefs/assumptions.

Also observed, (in case of IT resumes), the names of clients
associated with projects would be very absurd or ambiguous. Such as "State Bank, US", "VTC, Sweden" (A few names I found in Raghu's resume)

*Not to miss out this part*, candidates of this sort would not mention the name of the college they studied in, the branch they specialised in, not the year they passed out, or completed their course in, instead it would be,

" B.Tech from JNTU University, Hyderabad with an aggregate of 75%"

Also, you would notice that the percentage would tend to be rounded figures.

If you would want to confirm this. Call the candidates, the
probability that the candidate would say "I am busy, call me after 1 hour" is almost 90%.

The litmus test:
To eliminate them (to confirm your doubts), have a few (2 ot 3) basic questions in their branch of studies, and also in the area they claim expertise in, such as, in electronics, ask them what 'noise' is. Ask what the logic behind a 'multivibrator' is and where it is used in real life. Then ask them to tell you to explain how a recursive function would work, and what the flow of logic is. You may also ask questions like what the runtime memory allocation
table would look like etc.

After they have answered none of your questions, use your lively imagination and ask them something really silly and hypothetical and non-existent. If the candidate babbles out some answer, then you have just confirmed that the candidate is a fake.

I hope this was helpful and clarifies my perspective.

All I have to say

Why Recruiters Should Not Lie

Cutting Down Recruitment Overheads

The art of screening resumes

Interacting with candidates