How to Identify Fake Candidates via CV Reading

Tip 1: File Properties

Predominantly every recruiter either uses the word document of MS Office or Open Office. This works in both the format.

Go to File —> Properties —> Summary —> Author

If someone has created the CV themselves, the Author would ideally reflect the concerned Candidate’s name. If some other name reflects in the Author tab, there could be only 2 possibilities. Either the candidate has edited the CV of someone else or Someone else has prepared the CV for him/her.

If some other name appears other than the candidate’s name, do not conclude that the candidate is a fake. But that’s just an indicator of warning to have a closer scrutiny on the CV.

Tip 2 : CV Furnishing

Scroll to the bottom of the CV. Atleast in Indian context, there is a common practice among candidates to close the CV with a Declaration statement or with their Personal details. Check if either of it is there. Normally the fake candidates would furnish their CV without proper end to the document. They would have explained their Projects in the last section and the CV would abruptly end without furnishing with their Personal details or with the Declaration statement. If you see a CV like that, there is a 90% chance that the CV is a fake one.

Tip 3 : Font Variations

Lookout for the Font variations in the CV. Normally when someone prepares a CV, the headings and key highlights of the CV will be in a different format and all the rest of the descriptions will be in a different format.

If you see any irregular font variation amidst the Descriptions in their CV Summary, Role Description or Project Description, it is a clear indication that they have copied the respective statements from someone else and did not even bothered to correct the font matching their CV. That’s a common practice of a Fake candidate.

Tip 4 : Education and Year of Passing

In general, the fake candidates have a practice of not mentioning their Year of Passing in their CV.

Why do they do that?

Mentioning the year of passing will reveal the gap between their YOP and Employment start. But it is obviously going to be revealed when the recruiter talks. Still they do that assuming many recruiters will not be bothered about the gap. That’s a one more indicator for a candidate could possibly be a fake candidate.

Tip 5 : Employment Start Date

Majority of the fake candidates will have a standard format of having 1.5 years or 2 years of gap after their Graduation YOP. When you ask for a reason, you will get responses like they have worked in a college as a faculty or worked in a BPO and came out of it without collecting the exit papers. That’s a solid indicator for a fake candidate.

Tip 6 : Duration between employments

Most of the fake candidates use big brands as their employer. An ideal case would be

Currently working as a Software Engineer in CTS from Feb 2015 to till date

Worked as a Software Engineer in TCS from Aug 2013 to Jan 2015

The fakers normally split their entire experience into two halves, though not exactly but approximately. When you come across such patterns, beware !

Tip 7 : Study the Designation of each employments

Each company has a unique designation pattern. Let’s take the above case again.

For a 3 years employee, the designation in TCS would be Asst System Engineer and in CTS it is Programmer Analyst. And the same is applicable to other big players too. If some one claims that they are a permanent employee in those Organizations with designations like the pre quoted example, then that’s a sure shot fake candidature.

Tip 8 : Project duration

Most of the fake candidates do not furnish their project duration in their resume.

Tip 9 : Read the Projects

A raw fake candidate would have projects with titles like these: “Hospital management system”, “Library management system”, “hotel management system”. Beware of those similar project titles.

Tip 10 : Experience

Predominantly, the fake players will not risk themselves by quoting lot of experiences. Majorly they would prefer to quote their experiences somewhere between 2.5 to 4 years, an ideal experience for a Software Engineer role. Quoting more experiences than this would take them to the next league of Senior Engineers or Lead Engineers, which might be very hard for them to crack in interview for the level of training they had from their respective training institutes.

The aforementioned Tips are only indicators to identify the fake candidates. Keeping this as a screening parameter might save our time in sourcing, but might lead us to miss out on certain genuine candidates who are amateurish in resume writing.

You may have two choices now

Either you save your time and feel happy for rejecting the 90% fake candidates and leave the 10% genuine candidates as collateral damage or rather a price for their poor resume writing skills.

Or you may pick up your phone and do the phone screening to double verify if the candidate is really a fake candidate.

We shall discuss about “How to Identify the Fake Candidates via Phone Screening” in the next blog.

Happy Recruiting!