I’ve been asked to serve as a reference on numerous occasions throughout my career. I’m only ever been reached out to twice.
I bring this up, because I noticed recently somebody that I used to work with, had a career pivot. They went from Manual Quality Assurance tester to DevOps Engineer.
I thought this was great to see. That was, until I saw that they had retrofitted their time on my team with a title they didn’t have. To take it a step further, they absolutely didn’t do anything related to DevOps while on my team.
Doing a quick fact check on their previous employment, regardless of provided references would have yielded that they had lied about their actual job title. It’s not hard to get a contact or two from places.
This would be a major red flag for me as a hiring manager, to find out a candidate was straight up lying about a previous role. If you’re willing to lie about one job, what’s to say you wouldn’t lie about more than one, or even all? What’s to stop you from lying to me about other things down the road?
Believe it or not, this isn’t even the first time I’ve seen this from somebody I’ve worked with previously. Not to say the issue is rampant, but it definitely happens, and it definitely makes me a bit more paranoid going into hiring in the future.
Hiring is hard enough, but I’m not sure that I’d omit the reference checks.
