12 Comments
 

Yeah, extremely stupid reason too.

Kid had been referred by someone I went to college with. When asked “why IB?” he told me a story about him coming from utter poverty, having to steal to eat, being an orphan and stuff like that. Obviously the first thing I did right after the interview ended was call my buddy and check on his story, to which I learnt that not only was it all bs but he came from a well off background and both parents were alive and thriving.

Needless to say he didn’t go through. 

 
Most Helpful

Two CVs have come across my desk of people I knew and both were lying.

  1. Someone listed themselves as a senior position in the university investment society and several different things they achieved over the course of the year. I was president of the society that year and knew they had no involvement.
  2. Former colleague’s CV was sent to me by a colleague who was screening for recruitment. A lot of what he had done at the company we worked for at the time was heavily embellished, and others were outright bullshit - I knew this as he listed my workstreams / deliverables on projects he had minimal involvement on.

Dinged both, not out of malice but based on first hand professional experience. Be careful on lying / embellishing, if it comes across in your interview that you’ve done this it calls into question the rest of your CV. The main fuck ups I’ve seen on this is people saying they’re active members of their university investment society but can’t accurately recall any of their pitches, people who say they’re fluent in languages yet can’t interview in them, and people who list cool interests / hobbies to seem interesting / well-rounded but have nothing beyond a basic comprehension / experience in it. If you’ve listed something on your CV, you better be ready to discuss it in detail because you may encounter someone who can quickly see through the bullshit.

 

MidMarketMcLovin

people who list cool interests / hobbies to seem interesting / well-rounded but have nothing beyond a basic comprehension / experience in it.

Lol my most deeply humiliatingly interview experience was in college when I put "University XYZ basketball enthusiast" to sound like a chill guy who could talk sports around a water cooler. Got hella exposed for LARPing as a big sports guy, in an interview for LMM PE, when I couldn't name more than 1 player on our team. Felt like a total squid.  

 

My SO's father speaks 6 languages fluently. Every candidate that claimed to be conversational or fluent in one of the ones he spoke (European market and he speaks 6 European languages, so very frequent overlap), he'd switch to that language and continue the interview like that. Needless to say, he found that most people grossly exaggerated their language skills. Not sure if he ever dinged someone for it, but it must have been fun to watch these candidates shit bricks and scramble to string a few sentences together.

 

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