Oddly Sympathetic Towards Resume Vet Fail

Fake Magazine Cover Not the Least of Her Issues

I should love seeing things like this in the news, “A senior Trump administration official has embellished her résumé with misleading claims about her professional background.” Believe me, there’s more than one sweet spot hit, especially when the article goes on to say:

The gap between Chang's actual qualifications and her claims appears to be the latest example of lax vetting by the Trump administration, which has become known for its many job vacancies and appointments made without thorough screening.

You think I’d be blogging about this to say, a-ha. See. Resume fraud. Why. Are. You. Not. Checking. Them. Out. Fools. Or the one I like to use on people who actually remember the Fram Oil Man. Pay me now or pay me later. I mean oy vay iz mir, fake Time magazine not the least of her issues. Questions about education, speaking engagements, scope of her non-profit. Really, this is a great story about what can happen when you really put someone’s record through the ringer.

She did not hold up very well. Do you want to be the person who hires someone for a six figure job and have their resume crumble like the Bear’s 4th Quarter defense. I am not sympathetic to a person who bullshit so much and so well to get ahead. Nor do I feel that her trickery was so sophisticated that it required Sam Spade and a staff of one hundred consultants to suss out. I think I would have caught her or at least flagged her. Yet, there are many ways she was able to get away, and I really understand what happens all the time with people like her.

If It Wasn’t for those Damn Kids

Is it me or does a lot of what is happening these days seem like an episode of Scooby Doo. You know that last scene where Old Man McGillicuddy, still in his Creature of the Black Lagoon outfit but with the mask on the ground so we can see his face, railing that he would have succeeded in his pollution scheme if the Gang had not interfered. It seems this woman, Mina Chang, got stymied only when she was asked to provide documents to a Senate Committee in advance of a more important appointment. As happens so often these days, once the press smelled a rat, they started asking questions.

Read the linked article for all they found. Like I say, this person was quite creative in her credentialing. My point though is, it took a lot of work to track it all down. Ms. Changed benefited from one of the best strategies of an resume faker, throw so much out there, who has time to check it all. That’s the thing, in most background checks, there’s a lot more concern over criminal checks and things that are easy to answer, that need answering. What’s in the budget for the other things. You should take the time to check everything but do you? Those pesky kid just don’t have the same budget that most people do when looking at hires and such.

Can I Have Your Work Number Number

There’s always this balance between privacy and protection. For instance, there’s HIPAA, because we generally don’t want people to pry into our medical histories. Yet, your work history or college degree, how protected should those things be? It’s less the nature of the data and more that the dissemination of the data is now wrapped up and controlled by certain firms. The days of ringing up U of A, B, or C and asking for the registrar are gone. Things can be checked out and things are checked out, but believe me, for various reasons, there are things that are not as easy to check out as they used to be.

It’s Not the Crime it’s the Embellishment

Mina Chang’s story is a good one because she is less a resume faker and more a resume embellisher. Resume embellishment is both more common and harder to find. When you go though the litany of her things, you see how she skated by. Harvard alum, well as the article notes, “the school grants "alumni status" to anyone who attends certain executive education programs, even without having earned a degree.” She claimed she “addressed both the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 2016, but videos and documents show she instead at events held in Philadelphia and Cleveland during the same time periods there.” I can hear the argument about how these events were in essence part of the convention. Again, it takes those darn kids to really see through the scheme here.

The Happy Ending

I noted the other day that my wife and I have a fundamental disagreement over the amount of movies we need to see. It starts with the fact that she doesn’t need a happy ending. Let’s make this the Hole’s, the Working Girl, a Ground Hog Day of posts, with a happy ending. I want you to see that nailing a Mina Chang is not as easy as the splashy articles make it look. I don’t want to leave you thinking that you have to hire someone like me just to nail your MIna Chang. I want to end with this rejoinder, to pay attention to three things. First, approach every vet from the most basic position to the next Board Chair with intense skepticism. Assume they’re all fakes and frauds until proven otherwise. Second, make reasonable assumptions. Often the difference between moving along and making more calls is the strength of the tingle in your spidey sense. You don’t have to find each embellishment but you have to start finding the things that will make you want to find the embellishments. Third, as I said the other day, read the Wall Street Journal. It’s not so much the Journal per se, but you gotta know. You gotta be worldly, understand the ins and outs on what’s on resumes before you get to work on any specific resume. You don’t need to be a MBA, but you do need to know you way around the business section to be a good screener.

I am sympathetic towards people that fail to adequately vet resumes because I understand some good reasons why it can happen. If you don’t turn up your radar, follow-up on leads, and keep up with the news though, I’ll take away those sympathies.