Do People Lie on Resumes?
Yes. But the honest answer is more useful than the scary headline. What resume dishonesty actually is, why the survey numbers disagree, and how to test any claim before you stake a hire on it.
By Umair Ali · ·
Yes. But before you tighten your whole hiring process in response, look at what the surveys actually measured, because the details change the conclusion.
Search this question and you will be told that 70% of people lie on their resumes, or 64%, or 40%, depending on which survey you land on. The number is built to alarm you. It is also close to useless for anyone who is hiring, because it files a faked degree in the same drawer as someone who called themselves a "manager" after leading one project. Those are not the same thing. Treating them as the same is how good hiring decisions go wrong.
This is written for the person on the hiring side. If you want to know how much of what lands in your inbox you can trust, and what to do about it, that is the useful version of the question. Here is what the evidence says, and what it means for you.
What the numbers say, and why to hold them loosely
The surveys do not agree. That is the first thing worth knowing.
A ResumeLab survey of around 1,900 US workers, reported by Forbes, found that roughly 7 in 10 admitted to lying on a resume at some point. A StandOut CV survey put it near two-thirds and rising year on year. Indeed has cited an estimate closer to 40%. Older CareerBuilder polling found that most hiring managers, around 6 in 10, had personally caught a lie. So the true figure sits somewhere in a wide band, and nobody can tell you exactly where.
There are good reasons to hold these numbers loosely. They are self-reported, so they rest on people admitting to lying in a survey, and on what each survey decides to count as a lie. The definitions shift from study to study. And many of the splashiest figures come from companies that sell resume writing, background checks, or hiring tools, all of which have a quiet interest in the number sounding big. That does not make the surveys worthless. It makes them a rough signal rather than a hard fact. The safe reading is plain: resume dishonesty is common enough that you cannot assume a tidy document is a true one.
Lying and "lying" are two different problems
The word "lie" hides the distinction that matters most.
At one end is outright fabrication. A degree never earned. A job never held. A company that does not exist. This is real, and it ends careers when it surfaces, but as a share of applicants it is the smaller problem. The famous cases, the fake Harvard law degree, the invented Olympic medal, are famous because they are rare.
Far more common is embellishment. The job title nudged up a level. "We" quietly becoming "I." A project you supported described as one you led. A tool you touched once, listed beside the tools you use daily. Numbers rounded in a flattering direction. When surveys break down what people admit to, these are the top of the list. The ResumeLab data reported by Forbes put embellished responsibilities and inflated job titles well ahead of invented credentials.
The two problems need different answers, which is why the distinction is worth this much space. Fabrication is a verification problem, and a phone call to a university or a former employer often settles it. Embellishment is not a fraud you can catch that way, because on paper nothing was faked. It is ambiguity. And ambiguity is resolved by asking, not by checking a record.
The trap: you check the wrong things
Here is the part that catches employers out. The claims that are easiest to verify are the ones people embellish least. The claims people embellish most are the ones almost nobody verifies.
Dates and degrees are easy to check, so HR checks them. Reporting suggests employers routinely confirm employment dates and whether the degree is real. But the scope of a role, the size of someone's contribution, what they personally did versus what their team did, these are the most inflated parts of a resume and the least examined, because examining them is hard. You cannot ring a former employer and ask them to rate how much of a 40% revenue jump was really down to this one person. So the padding sits precisely where your standard checks never reach. You confirm the honest parts and wave the embellished ones through.
Stop hunting liars. Test claims.
The natural response to all this is to get suspicious. That is the wrong turn.
Treat hiring as liar-detection and two things happen, both bad. You get paranoid, and you start reading ordinary confidence as deception. And you punish the honest, because the candidate who wrote plainly and truthfully looks less impressive on the page than the one who inflated everything, so your suspicion lands on the wrong person. The real embellisher, meanwhile, sails through, because their padding is not a fraud that suspicion can see.
The better frame drops the moral question. Instead of "is this person lying?", ask "is this claim true, whoever wrote it?" Treat every important line as a claim to be tested, not a confession to be trusted or a fraud to be exposed. Most of your candidates are not lying. But you cannot tell which ones from the document, and the honest and the inflated read identically on paper, so you test all of them the same way. It is less dramatic than catching a liar. It works better.
How to test a claim
Testing a claim is simpler than it sounds. It is mostly one move: ask for the detail underneath.
Take any impressive line and ask the person to walk you through exactly what they did. Real ownership survives the follow-up, because someone who did the work has the details sitting right there. Embellishment goes vague, because there is no detail to give. Watch the pronouns. "We launched it," offered in answer to a question about what they did, is a soft tell. Ask what went wrong, what they would do differently, which part would not have happened without them. Padding cannot answer those. Experience can, easily.
None of this asks you to accuse anyone. You are asking good questions, the same ones, of everyone. The honest candidate enjoys them, because they finally get to show the work behind the line. The embellisher does not enjoy them at all.
The part you cannot do alone
This works beautifully for one candidate across a desk. It falls apart at a hundred.
You cannot get on a call with every applicant and follow up on every claim, so the claims go untested, and you fall back on reading the resume, which is the one thing that cannot tell you whether the resume is true. This is the gap BestHire is built to close, and it is worth being plain about what it does. You post the role and get one link that collects every applicant. It interviews everyone who fits, not a few you picked first, and each interview is built from that person's own resume, pressing on the specific claims they made. It is the same "walk me through exactly what you did" move, run across the whole pile. It reads only what the person says, never their face, voice, or accent. Then it ranks people by whose claims held up and hands you a short list with the evidence attached: the line from the resume, and the answer that backed it or broke it.
The framing here is deliberate, and it is not liar-detection. It rejects nobody, and it labels nobody a liar. It tests what everyone claims, honest or not, and lets the difference surface on its own. The strong honest candidate rises, because their claims hold. The embellisher slips, because theirs thin out under questioning. You still make every call. The thing you stop doing is deciding from a document written to look good.
Where the line sits
One honest complication, because waving it away would be its own small dishonesty. Not all embellishment is disqualifying, and reasonable people draw the line in different places. Someone who says they "managed" a project they co-led is rounding up, and rounding up is a long way from inventing a degree. A little self-promotion is built into the format. A resume is a sales document, and everyone treats it as one. The aim is not to punish anyone who ever framed themselves well, because that is everyone. The aim is to know what is real before you stake a hire on it, and to keep the small stuff in proportion. Where rounding up tips into lying is a judgment call, and it stays yours. I do not think there is a clean rule for it, and anyone who hands you one is selling something.
The short version
- Yes, resume dishonesty is common. But the headline percentages are soft, self-reported, and often published by people with something to sell.
- The rare problem is fabrication: a fake degree, a made-up job. The common one is embellishment: inflated titles, borrowed credit, padded skills.
- Your standard checks catch the honest parts, dates and degrees, and miss the embellished parts, scope and achievements.
- Ask everyone to walk you through the detail behind each important line. That is the whole method.
- Most candidates are not lying, but you cannot tell which from the page, so verify all of them the same way.
- Rounding up is not fraud. Keep the small stuff in proportion.
This is the awareness half of a practical process. The full sequence, from posting the role to making the offer, is in How to Hire Your First Employee.