Fraudulent Resumes and How They Negatively Effect Hiring in the IT Industry

There are many job boards available to job seekers today.  Most everyone has heard of the Big 3:  Careerbuilder, Monster & Indeed, but were you aware that all the major job boards get bombarded with fake resumes?

When you upload your resume onto a job board, you rely on the integrity of that entity.  Unfortunately, on a regular basis, all the major job boards get flooded with fake resumes, particularly in IT related fields.  These resumes are typically uploaded by unscrupulous 3rd party consulting / staffing firms that use them to bait employers/Recruiters into contacting them, they'll usually respond to the inquiry stating that the person you're reaching out to is no longer available but they have a variety of qualified candidates they'd be happy to submit. 

These cases create a hindrance to qualified, honest job seekers by bogging down the system, wasting employer/recruiter time, and making it difficult to determine which resumes are genuine and which are not.

For example; today I logged on to a job board to search for a specific Human Capital Management software experienced consultant.  I entered my key words and the search resulted in about 250 resumes from the last 6 mos.  Of those resumes, about 50% were fake.  I counted 4 resume variations (4 identical resumes), all with different names and all in different metropolitan areas.  It usually takes a few minutes to pick up on the fact that a resume looks familiar, and realize the last 2 resumes you reviewed were almost exactly the same, with the same employers, the same key words, the same experience and summary, just the name and location were different.

This fraudulent activity makes it so time consuming to find the right people that Recruiters are often turning to LinkedIn as the main source for qualified candidates.

If you are not on LinkedIn, set up a profile!  If you are on LinkedIn, make sure your profile resembles your resume, has all the appropriate key words, and mentions in the "About" section that you are open to employment opportunities if it is safe for you to do so.

If you are loading your resume onto a job board - try to differentiate yourself from the fray by putting something eye catching in the Summary section like "Available For New Projects In June!".

Oddly this is a little discussed or recognized phenomenon.  In conversations with some of the job board representatives, they are often unaware of the issue until a client who uses their service to search for resumes brings it to their attention, at which time they will conduct a search and remove the duplicated resumes.   Hopefully the more these issues are reported, the sooner the job boards will make a consistent effort to remove fake resumes from their sites.