22-04-2025
Work warning over ‘dodgy' resume detail as Aussies caught in blatant lies
Aussie job seekers are being warned against putting fake references on their resumes as they can be 'quickly' found out and "blacklisted or red flagged'. A huge number of Aussie workers have admitted to lying on their resumes, and there can be major consequences if they are caught out.
Realistic Careers career coach Tammie Ballis said recruiters could '100 per cent' tell when job seekers had put forward fake reference checks. During one of her recent live Q&A sessions on TikTok, she told job seekers that recruiters used online reference checking systems like Xref and Referoo.
She said this allowed recruiters to 'very quickly work out if it was fake'.
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'This is what happens with technology and being online. It opens up the door to fraud,' Ballis said.
'So, just taking a reference over the phone or whether it's online as verbatim is very silly and very negligent and naive. You need to be doing follow-ups and be doing background checks.'
Ballis told Yahoo Finance she'd seen job seekers fill out their own references, pretending to be their boss.
'You can tell because of the IP address,' she said.
'A lot of the time, you can work out whether it's a home address because you can see there's no industrial area there, and they said they worked on site. How is this person filling out a reference at 3 o'clock in the morning?
'They don't understand that we can verify information. So if someone's declared that they are who they say they are, we go and ring payroll, we do LinkedIn checks, online checks.
'If they can't prove the reference check is the person, a lot of the time they've lied.'
A recent survey of 1,003 Aussies by Tapt found 33 per cent of Aussies had lied during the job search process.
The most common lie was about why they had left their previous employer, their employment dates and previous duties. About 2.2 per cent admitted to giving fake references.
A separate survey of 1,001 Aussies by StandOut Resume found 42 per cent had lied in a job application or interview, with 19 per cent of people lying more than once.
The resume advice site claimed it could pay to lie, with job applicants who fudged the truth earning $15,000 more on average than those who told the truth.
Ballis said she got questions from job seekers all the time asking if they could 'embellish' their resume.
'You can do whatever you like but if you're going to lie, you have to be prepared to be questioned," she said.
"If they can tell that you've lied, you get blacklisted or red-flagged.'
Ballis said people needed to be careful if they were trying to be "dodgy" on their reference checks and said it could show poor integrity.
