Advice and guides / For candidates
Why exaggerated experience now gets caught in screening
The gap between what a CV claims and what a person did used to survive until the second interview. It now tends not to survive the first thirty minutes.
For a long time, screening meant a keyword filter and a phone call. Both were easy to pass with a CV that stretched. The filter reads for tool names, and a phone call with a busy recruiter rarely gets past the second layer of any answer.
Two things changed. Employers started asking for evidence earlier, and the cost of generating a question from a specific CV fell to almost nothing. That second change is the one that matters.
Why CV questions are hard to fake
A general question has a general answer available. Ask what the steps in a month end close are, and the answer is on the internet, in order, in three hundred words. Ask someone the order they did it in at a named employer, and the one thing that most often went wrong, and the internet has nothing to offer.
Someone who sat in that chair answers in two minutes without thinking hard. The answer has texture: a system name, a person who was always late with something, a month that was worse than the others. Someone who did not sit in that chair writes something correct, general and flat.
Nobody has to accuse anybody. The two answers simply read differently, and the difference goes in the report.
The timing tells its own story
- Forty seconds on a question that takes four minutes usually means the answer came from somewhere else.
- Nine minutes on a question that takes two usually means it was assembled rather than recalled.
- A paste event with four hundred characters in a free text answer is recorded, with the length.
- Tab switches during a written question are timestamped.
None of this is used on its own to reject anybody. It sits next to the answer so a human can read both.
What actually happens when a CV does not stand up
Less than people fear, and more than people hope. In our reports it is a flag next to the score, not a rejection. A hiring manager reads the answer that produced the flag and decides. Sometimes they interview anyway, because the flag was about one line on a CV and the rest of the paper was strong.
What it does cost you is the benefit of the doubt, at the exact moment you needed it.
If your CV already overstates something
- Change it now, before the next application. Soften the claim to what you did. You lose almost nothing.
- Do not delete the line. A smaller true claim is worth more than a gap.
- If you are already in a process, correct it yourself, in writing, before anyone finds it. Recruiters handle a voluntary correction routinely. They handle a discovered one very differently.
- Do not have someone else sit an assessment for you. Two candidates answering from the same device or network is one of the easiest things in the world to see.
The upside of all this is for the honest majority. If you did the work, these questions are the easiest marks on the paper, and they are the reason a real candidate with a plain CV now beats a polished one. See what the thirty minutes covers, or start.