Hacker Remix

Ask HN: How much employee resume verification is done in practice?

47 points by NewUser76312 6 days ago | 79 comments

We all know that it's commonplace to 'put your best foot forward' on resumes as an employee, and sometimes this can lead into bending the truth a little bit.

But I'm curious in practice how much actual employee resume verification is done? Do people even check if they've graduated the colleges they say they have, or have evidence of employment of somewhere they've noted down? What about job titles?

I'm also wondering how thorough current FAANG-type companies are. This topic came to mind after seeing a 'resume prank' video where someone came up with a ridiculous and troll-ish resume (with rude and offensive jokes in the bullet points), but had 'Stanford', 'Amazon', etc, and so he got about 30 out of 100 interviews applying to top (US) tech companies. Is this fakery something that would get someone caught further down the line perhaps?

Just been very curious how this all works in practice lately. I've done some hiring in the past and typically I'll just call contact references (who I can't even ensure are real people tbh). Of the few times I've requested a transcript, I take it at face value and have no way of telling if it's doctored.

PaulHoule 6 days ago

My Aunt Ruth(less) attempted to murder her mentally retarded sister with insulin and did time. Later on she applied for a job at a nursing home and failed to check the box about prior felony convictions. Got the job anyway. My father-in-law was in the hospital at the time and we were terrified when Ruth, who was visiting, changed his IV.

She tried to end a patient at the nursing home and was also busted for raiding the medicine cabinet. Obviously no check.

My son applied for a job at a small construction firm and they did call his references.

farseer 2 days ago

Perhaps employers doing background checks are lenient on women in America? Or perhaps times have changed from your aunt's generation to your son's.

bongodongobob 6 days ago

To be fair, there is a LOT of turnover in construction, which is probably why.

cal85 6 days ago

Why would more turnover imply more reference-checking?

bongodongobob 5 days ago

Unreliable workers cause timeline problems. They can't build the roof first or do the wiring before the walls are put up. If some guy quits, gets fired, injured, it can throw off other dependant timelines. Maybe now that Bob got fired for showing up drunk and hurting someone, framing is going to take 2 more weeks, and now the drywaller contractors window got fucked up, they drop the job, and now you have to find another drywaller contractor on short notice. Maybe you can't until 6 months, so now your plasters are gone too, etc.

chucksta 6 days ago

They've been burned more times and therefore do more investigation to keep that from happening in the future

not_your_vase 6 days ago

At some places they took my word for everything.

At some other places (notably banks) did full background check, calling all my previous employers from the past 10 years, and asking for criminal records from all countries where I spent more than 3 months in the past 5 years. They also wanted all kind of documentation where they found some discrepancy between my CV and their findings...

(Funnily they never asked for the records from my original country. For all they care, I might be a fugitive murderer there, as long as I have paid my parking tickets in the other countries...)

lylejantzi3rd 6 days ago

Do you know what a full background check shows?

Calling all of your previous employers will get them your dates of employment and nothing else. Less than that if you worked for a startup that went out of business.

jabroni_salad 6 days ago

I once failed to get hired by an F100 company because of that last sentence. It was a small business that had gone under after a few years after I moved away.

Since the business's domain and phone number no longer worked I had to get a letter of reference on """corporate letterhead""". He had never made any such thing so he printed it on the back of a receipt. Bigcorp HR hated this and said they were moving in a different direction.

It was really annoying at the time because I was fresh out of college and did not have any other jobs to list as experience.

Spooky23 5 days ago

Not always.

HR people say that they do that to avoid liability, but… typically they aren’t covered by NDA, and there’s only slander/defamation if you find out about it, it’s negative, and it’s not true.

I used to do my own reference checks and got lots of info, often without asking. Well placed silence will often lead people to jabber. More often than not they would say lovely things. They they’d say lovely things than silence on a difficult topic.

cryptonector 6 days ago

> Calling all of your previous employers will get them your dates of employment and nothing else.

Eh, HR at previous employers might share whether you were a problem employee. And any references you provide from previous employers had better speak glowingly about you -- if they wouldn't, don't provide them.

I don't know if any of the references I've ever given were called, but since none of the references I've given ever told me about getting called about me I assume none were called. To be fair I've had a) few jobs, b) enough credentials in terms of portfolio of public works (in standards setting organizations, in open source, etc.) that there is little need to check those references. If you interview me and you can get me to talk in detail about said public work and also you can check how I think and would solve problems, then between that and a background check that's almost certainly enough.

This is why I tell people to make sure to have a portfolio of public work. In practice it is difficult to make a large portfolio of public work -- at some point that has to include participation in the upstreams of external open source, in mailing lists, in fora, etc., and that all takes time and not being shy. Most job applicants are not going to have much of a portfolio.

lylejantzi3rd 6 days ago

We're not talking about references. We're talking about potential employers calling the companies listed on your resume to verify your employment history, either as part of the interview process or as part of a background check.

> Eh, HR at previous employers might share whether you were a problem employee.

HR departments are trained to say exactly two things: whether or not the person worked there and the person's dates of employment. Anything else can result in a lawsuit.

nostrademons 6 days ago

Google verifies with a third-party background check service, but the service fucked up my resume. I had an employer that had since gone bankrupt (actually, all my employers besides Google have since gone bankrupt), and they couldn't find the business, so they just did the closest string match to the business name, which happened to be a local grocery store whose name was one letter off. Sure enough, I come back as never having worked there, because that's not the company I wrote on my resume, doofus.

It ended up working out because I had previously worked at Google and my former skip-level, who knew me personally, was now the SVP signing my offer letter. But if the hiring process is this incompetent, it makes me wonder how many other people have real career consequences because background check services are lazy and incompetent.

weinzierl 6 days ago

I think it is a risk reward thing for the background check services. False negatives do not nearly hurt them as much as false positives. They are incentivized to process candidates quickly and must limit the time they work on each profile. Doing deeper and time-intensive research has not benefit for them, so they find a plausible reason to put laborious profiles in the bad pile.

What you call lazy and incompetent is probably a system working as intended where the collateral damage is accepted approvingly.

muzani 6 days ago

Personally I don't like applying to these companies because the false negative rates makes it feel like a lottery. I'd rather just do the other lottery and start a business.

ctkhn 5 days ago

had something like this happen for two of the roles, the verification contractor was put on hold by hr and then never followed up and marked my internship jobs as false. had to call them up personally to get it fixed

VirusNewbie 5 days ago

that's weird, usually they let you verify other ways by showing tax returns or something.

At one point for Verizon I had to prove I did 1099 work for a company and had to show bank deposits from the LLC! (With amounts redacted).

ahel 4 days ago

welcome to the real world where no one does a good job and everyone is more or less impacted.

dyingkneepad 6 days ago

Okay, so he got the interviews, but did he pass them?

In the place I work for, when engineers are going to conduct technical interviews, the only preparation material they are given is the candidate's resume. So we try to ask questions based on their experience in the places they claimed to have worked for. It's not super hard to realize the job description in the resume is embellished once you start asking questions, but yes this is not fool-proof. Still, the best candidates will often have very interesting discussions about challenges they had in their previous jobs and be able to properly articulate what they did and why and how. If you're gonna lie, you better back it up very well.

NewUser76312 6 days ago

I'm curious about this more from an employer's perspective, especially as a smaller operation (contracting firm).

If somebody claims to have worked at Amazon as a product manager for 2 years, and rehearses a story they wrote with ChatGPT (who maybe has data from blogs of related product managers)... Then I'd probably get fooled, if the candidate was reasonably well-spoken and confident. Similarly, I don't have the time or patience to contact a university to try and get real verification for a transcript. Just being honest...

TeMPOraL 6 days ago

Ironically, for some roles (more on the people and marketing side), a candidate that managed to convincingly act out a fabricated employment history would be demonstrating the very skills required for the job they're interviewing for.

ChrisMarshallNY 6 days ago

I remember telling an interviewer that I could provide links to decades' worth of repos, with full, high-Quality source code for multiple shipping apps, and very detailed checkin history. I could also reference Web sites, with many years' worth of extremely well-written blog entries and tutorial series.

I was told they weren't going to look at it, because I "probably faked it."

It was at that point, that I realized that no one wanted me, and I gave up looking. I guess that I could have said that if I had been able to fake that stuff, they should hire me right away, because I'm a leet wizard, but I'm sure they said that, to evoke exactly the reaction they got, and I was better off, not working there.

I won't go, where I'm not wanted.

dyingkneepad 6 days ago

On the technical side, if you have actually worked with certain stuff you will have gone through certain experiences that everybody else has gone through. Some tools are absolutely necessary but horrible to work with in certain ways. Some libraries are a pain in the back to use, but are unavoidable. Compiling certain components may be a huge pain.

Stupid example: the person claims they know CSS, and you bring up the subject of aligning a div for the first time.