The head of the Northern Territory public service has warned staff to “carefully verify” employee qualifications, after the anti-corruption watchdog found a public officer falsified their resume to win three high-ranking jobs.
The Commissioner for Public Employment, Vicki Telfer, said “integrity in recruitment [was] fundamental to ensuring the [Northern Territory Public Service] has a highly capable workforce”.
Last week, Independent Commissioner Against Corruption (ICAC), Michael Riches, found an unnamed “public officer” falsified qualifications and engaged in corrupt conduct on three occasions.
He did not identify the person but said they had been the chief financial officer of a public body in 2013 and 2017 and the chief operating officer in 2018.
“If an applicant is unable to produce a copy of a qualification they claim to have in their resume, they are not to be progressed to the on-boarding stage,” Ms Telfer said.
I wrote about fraudulent resumes and LinkedIn sites in Smart Company some years ago.
The most common section for fraud is academic credentials. A degree from Bond University isn’t unusual. A degree from the Bluetooth Institute of Technology is. There’s no such institute.
Australian degrees or TAFE qualifications are frequently checked. Did they really get that PhD at 20 years of age?
If the applicants comes from Africa or eastern Europe, they need to provide third party bona fides, usually from the Federal Government or a professional association.
Recruiters sometimes check the chronology of the resume against their LinkedIn profile. If there are major discrepancies, that’s a red flag.
There can be a few gaps here and there but where dates have been moved around or where there are major holes, that can be problematic.
Are the companies they worked for hard to verify? If they’re Australian, recruiters will go to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and see if they were ever listed.
It’s a sea of titles out there but if an applicant says they were a “managing director”, recruiters frequently check. People too easily appropriate titles and therefore seniority—but that can bring them down.
If the resume reads like blocks of it have been copied and pasted from a position description, that’s a red flag (especially for senior positions). Position descriptions are easy to access on the web.
Keep the resume honest. Lies are hard to remember.