When jockeying for an open position, serious candidates rarely miss an opportunity to better their application. From practice interviews to professional resume reviews, there are countless ways to make themselves stand out as the ideal candidate. While some focus on finding ways to highlight strengths and others attempt to cleverly tiptoe around potential holes, most are harmless rhetorical strategies that result from being well-prepared.
As hiring managers use the internet more and more in their evaluations of potential new hires, however, they are coming across a new, more deceptive way some candidates are trying to augment their hiring profiles: lying on LinkedIn.
Candidates most often misrepresent themselves after losing their jobs, says Anthony Gargiulo Jr., a recruiter and human resources practitioner writing in the Chicago Tribune. Rather than updating their profile to reflect their change in employment status, Gargiulo says job seekers often leave their headlines unchanged or fail to add an end date to their most recent job, leading profile viewers to believe they are still with their previous company.
While mere carelessness is doubtless behind some of these errors (many people don't log into LinkedIn every day), job seekers have a responsibility to keep their profiles up-to-date, just as they would a resume. Unlike resumes, however, LinkedIn's on-demand nature carries with it an implication that the information on a given profile will always be kept current.
In other situations, job seekers deliberately misrepresent themselves because they fear the stigma society tends to hold against the unemployed. In these cases, recruiters and hiring managers are in fact far more likely to respect the honest, enthusiastic job seeker over someone who is not forthcoming. In fact, recruiters tend to understand unemployment, Gargiulo writes, focusing on what candidates do to bounce back. Rather than get a leg up, Gargiulo continues, "job-seeking professionals compound their job-search challenges when they misrepresent themselves thinking they'll get a foot in the door."
Whether they are already employed or in between roles, CEOs looking for new opportunities can reach out to executives recruiters for help finding open roles before they hit job boards. Retained executive search firms can be some of the most helpful to work with, as they tend to understand hiring companies' needs best, putting them in a better position to match executives with companies they are well suited for.
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