Caveat Employer? Lying At Application Time

As with most employment lawyers, I have had a fair number of cases where employees were later found to have lied about some aspect of their past when they applied. We even have a whole body of law centered around the concept, the after acquired evidence doctrine. But even I was shocked by the numbers in Anne Fisher's Fortune column. According to a study of 2.6 million resumes she cites, "44% contained exaggerations or outright fabrications about work experience, 23% listed bogus credentials, and 41% boasted fictional degrees." Now that's a lot of resume stretching going on.