Fake Leonardos: resume inflation

This year marks the 500th death anniversary of one of the foremost creative individuals in the modern world, Leonardo Da Vinci. Also, according to Wikipedia, Leonardo is credited to have come up with the world’s first resume, a French word that means a summary of one’s skills, which Leonardo provided to an employer.

Little would he have realized that today, in our post-industrial lives, the resume would assume such criticality in teasing out the lemons from the apples in the labour market, both in developed and developing economies. Michael Spence, the Nobel Laureate economist in fact studies it in detail in his body of work on job market signalling. The resume assumes critical importance, more so today given underlying transformations in the economy coming from globalization, immigration, technology or Artificial Intelligence.

But in India, another silent pandemic related to the resume is on the rise, and one is not sure anybody is paying attention. According to a 2017 report published by AuthBridge, resume fraud or inflation, as you may want to name it, is pervasive in India. This report points out that one in six candidates misrepresent facts on their resume while approaching employers. The nature of misrepresentation varied from employment information (12% candidates engaged in this), discrepancies in address (6.7%), references (3.4%) and education details (1.6%). In addition, candidates failed to clear drug tests, provided fake IDs, and could not clear police verification, among other problems.

Further, telecom and financial services sectors seem to be the hub of such behaviour -- upwards of 20% of candidates engaging in resume fraud here, while the industry average was about 15%. In sectors like internet and e-commerce, this percentage was about 12%. Such behaviour has obviously led to the creation of an active background-screening market in India as a response to parse out the lemons that would impact labour productivity of firms. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any estimate out there, however, which backs the contribution of this thousand-pound gorilla to an already declining trend in labour productivity of the economy.

Background-screening is also only a quick fix to this problem. One probably needs to dig deeper and understand behavioural antecedents. For example, as a student from the Indian higher education system, I can share that among the first tenets that the peer ecosystem in India’s higher education colleges imparts, is one of a culture that, sadly, institutionalizes and teaches resume inflation. For example, senior students teach juniors how to package one’s resume into a one-pager, inflating one’s skills and accomplishments.

The dramatic effect of such a culture is now manifest to me as a professor from the provider side, especially when I see resumes for summer and winter internships at the IIMs. Dodgy claims are quite the norm, sadly by young impressionable students, and these range from claiming that they had done well in National Olympiads of all hues and professing expertise in a variety of new-age programming languages like Python or R. They are also equally proficient it seems in equestrianism or playing the ukulele.

While it is true that every once in a while, one does run into a genuinely talented student, these resume claims generate deep structural concern where the blame cannot be pinned on these students alone. Over the years, perusing profiles on LinkedIn of individuals, one can also witness spurious claims of being alumnus of a Yale or a Harvard surfacing from industry veterans, when all that one has done is probably a 3-day workshop from these places.

In the net, so long as we don’t create ethical standards here in the society and the economy, it is unclear what moral compass young students will adopt in thinking about resume inflation. They are, after all, emerging from an extremely competitive higher education environment and are under the radar from private tutorials while facing the winds of change from a transforming and globalizing economy.

Maybe India’s clever entrepreneurs can solve this issue using technology, one wonders. Perhaps strong punitive measures could be an answer? Could resume fraud be coming from a rise of private tutorials in India’s education systems and can this trend be established and then addressed? One also wonders, relatedly here, how the culture of resume inflation is legitimized by its evangelizers and from which regional hotspots in the economy.

New economy big data from the likes of naukri.com, glassdoor or LinkedIn could provide answers here, with analytics on multidimensional observations at the individual level, applying techniques from machine learning and natural language processing. Catching fake Leonardos, their antecedents, process of legitimacy creation, and perpetuation should be a challenge India should accept to eradicate this silent disease. Else, its competitiveness and the established credibility of its human capital in the global market is bound to suffer going forward. One hopes India’s policy makers are paying attention.

(The writer is a 2018-19 Campbell and Edward Teller National Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is an Associate Professor of Economics and Business Policy at IIM Ahmedabad)