Will Resume Padding Come Back to Bite You In a Background Investigation?

Welcome back. You’re with Sean Bigley and Lindy Kyzer of ClearanceJobs.com. We’re talking this segment about fibbing on your resume. Lindy, this is an article that we recently had on the website. We wanted to do a little bit deeper dive on it, so I’m curious to get your perspective. First of all, I know you’ve seen a lot of applicant resumes and job applications, and I’m sure you’ve seen some interesting things as far as applicants sort of massaging the facts, which is my personal favorite way to describe inflating resume. Anything come to mind off the top of your head? Any particularly wild stories?

I mean, they’re not wild. I don’t know. You kind of launched me hard there, Sean. I was like, oh wait, you’re going to be disappointed. But I thought that the article you’re referencing was super interesting because we had this individual, you think about it, you do kind of oversell yourself a little bit in the job search, and I’m all about, I think imposter syndrome is a big issue. I think there’s two types of people, right? Those who severely overinflate their skills and those who don’t, and when it comes to the government hiring process, unfortunately they don’t grade on a curve. Someone was like, you got to throw whatever you got, especially if you’re applying on USAJobs. So we have the two sides of it, what people put on their resume or their application, and somebody came up and they were like, oh. Then I started to fill out the SF-86 and I realized it might not all match.

(01:48)
So I thought that was the interesting piece of it. Clearly, if you lie about something big on your resume, you should, or usually eventually that comes back to haunt you somewhere down the hiring process, especially if you stay with the same company, maybe if you change companies and fix it. I thought that was interesting. They were curious if what was on the SF-86 would get cross-referenced back in their employment process. Now, typically those things are separate, but the background investigators in our thread held no punches in saying that to them was kind of a sign of reliability, trustworthiness, a red flag for them in the process. So I’m definitely curious, based on your background and understanding of this, have you seen this come up? Do you think it’s an issue? For me, I kind of think a lot of times those two systems, so it is up to the applicant to kind of come full circle and then tell their employer, because otherwise you could have different information on the SF-86 than you had in your employment application, and I don’t think that would frequently get crossed over.

It’s an interesting conundrum and something that I think is actually, I hate to use the term loophole, but maybe an area of the background investigation process that probably could use some work. You’re right in the big picture, generally human resources functions and security functions are kept separate. That’s particularly true, or it’s supposed to be particularly true in the government contracting world because you have this concern of, well, okay, I’m a private sector employer. Yes, I’m contracting for the government, but at the end of the day, I as an employer are still being held to various state anti-discrimination laws, federal anti-discrimination laws in the hiring process. And so if I’m collecting job applicant information on an SF-86 that may implicate certain areas of protected characteristics like race, gender, ethnicity, et cetera, et cetera, that would be a potential problem if then I’m somehow using that or being seen as using that in the hiring process.

(03:48)
That piece of this is something that I’ve written about in a separate context, this concern about pre-hiring clear ability assessments that a lot of employers are using because they think it’s good business sense, which I don’t necessarily disagree with, but from a legal standpoint, not such a good idea. Now that being said, from the applicant’s standpoint, they may not understand the distinction, and so I think you’re right that there are some applicants who are wary of inflating their resume too much, lest it come back to bite them, and I think that’s always a good warning to heed, whether it’s in the government sector or the private sector. You’ve got to be careful. I mean, there’s a fine line. I think everybody sort of polishes their resume, tries to make themselves look as best they can, but when it crosses the line into outright falsification, that is a problem.

(04:38)
That all being said, I will say, and I guess I should mention for those of our listeners who are not aware, so I obviously have been a defense attorney, security clearance defense attorney was for many years. Prior to that though, I was a background investigator, so I’ve seen this from both sides of the table. When we talked about this segment, one of the things that came to mind was on occasion as a background investigator, I would get an SF-86 with somebody’s resume stapled to it, and it was almost like a little clue that maybe somebody somewhere, an adjudicator somewhere in the process looked at this person’s application and went, I don’t know about that one. Let’s find out that doesn’t smell right. And so whenever that happened, I would always take extra care in looking at HR files and things that are supposed to be examined by background investigators anyway, but normally just get a perfunctory glance over because they’re not looking for that. It does happen. There are cases where people run into a brick wall during the security clearance process for something they put on their resume. Is it super common? Not necessarily. When it does happen, it’s not good.

The example they had here, again, I sometimes root for the underdog or the person who lied, but only a little bit. It was like a little lie, but this person had inflated their job title specifically was the question that we asked. And that’s where I do say, I think probably the background investigators who were just totally throwing this guy under the bus we’re correct and saying that, Hey, this could come up to catch you. A background investigator is going to flag this. We called his employer. That wasn’t his job title when he worked there. He had inflated his job title. But again, as someone who has done some resume finessing in the past of job titles and made up my own job titles, there was a sense of just be upfront about it in the process. Like, oh, when you catch that, you’re like, oh, actually I did kind of inflate this.

(06:34)
I thought I was working up to the level of a senior engineer even though I was a help desk technician. I think be upfront and then let the chips fall where they may, but I hate job titles. This is going off on a severe tangent of mine. They don’t often reflect what you’re actually doing with an employer, and I think so much of getting the next job as they’re looking at what your trajectory was and if you feel you were underemployed, clearly, I work in marketing. Sean, can you tell us this is the law background versus the marketing background? Well, I don’t know really. Were you in the technical background? This guy just has to come up front and say, yes, I overinflated my job title, and then I think you’d have a decent chance of obtaining clearance. Clearly we don’t know. But if that’s the one issue that you had is that you put an overinflated job title on your resume and everything else about it was correct, right? You weren’t lying about years of experience. You weren’t lying about other things. You were just, again, find a marketer to talk to you like I do. But you are going to have to come up front because it will likely come up in that sense of if they’re verifying employment.

Yeah, that’s funny. I mean, I do think it is a case sometimes of what your profession is, how you view things. I mean, obviously I’m a lawyer, so I’m pretty cynical and I by nature take a skeptical approach to things, but maybe as a marketer it’s sort of in your nature to look for a better angle or a better title. I don’t know. But I mean, I think one distinction that is worth making here, and I think this is really important for security clearance applicants, is the type of things that regardless of whether or not your CV gets stapled to your SF-86 by someone in the background investigation process, the things that are going to come up just as a matter of course, and the things that get verified by investigators as a matter of course, and those are the job title, the dates of employment, whether or not there was any disciplinary history, and the reason for leaving.

(08:31)
Those are kind of the big four key things that background investigators are checking for. And so if, for example, the inflation on your resume is, oh, I was at this employer for three years when in fact you were there for two and you had a year of unemployment, but you don’t want that on the resume, so we’re going to add another year. That becomes a big problem. Similarly, you’re putting on a resume that you left this employer for a better opportunity or something along those lines, and you’re kind of fudging the reason for the departure. That’s also going to be viewed as an integrity issue because then again, it becomes an issue of, well, okay, do I lie again on the SF 86 to make it match and then subject myself to criminal penalties? Do I not mean, those are not positions that you as an applicant want to put yourself in?

(09:24)
And so sometimes the hardest part about a lie is remembering what the lie was or having to keep making the lie in other contexts and it starts to snowball. So I think best piece of advice that I could give as someone who’s seen this on both sides of the table, both as a defense attorney and as a background investigator, is it’s a lot easier to keep track of it when you just tell the truth. And the reality is, nine times out of 10 people who get nailed in the background investigation process and don’t get the clearance, it’s not because of a substantive issue per se. It’s not because they had a period of unemployment or they left this one employer because they didn’t get along with somebody. Nine times out of 10, it’s because they lied about it. They sort of say, in the law, the coverup is often worse than the crime.

(10:10)
That’s very true. The penalties for that tend to be many times more severe than the actual penalties for whatever you did. So that’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t scenarios that are going to be a problem if you were fired from a job because you were stealing. You may not get the clearance, but ultimately it is a snowball effect, and this is something that I think also tends to follow applicants more than anything else. Perceptions of integrity or lack thereof. Yeah. Again, I think best piece of advice there is really take a hard look at your own resume before you submit it somewhere and ask yourself, is there anything on here that really crosses this line from difference of opinion or subjectivity into just an objective falsification?

Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Unless you work in marketing.