Should you lie to get your dream job?

In a recent survey of US-based human resource professionals conducted by Reader’s Digest magazine, one of the respondents stated that an interview was “not the place to be yourself”. According to the insider – an HR consultant in Raleigh, North Carolina – anyone who has even been told to let their true character shine through during an interview has been given “the worst advice ever”.

“We don’t want people who are neurotic and quirky and whatever else,” she expands. “All we care about is your skill and experience.”

It’s a rather sobering – and scary – thought, and Jessica makes it sound even more terrifying when she argues that when you’re being interviewed you are either consciously or unconsciously selling your brand.

“The ideal brand that employers are looking for is a person who has the skills to do the job, but also one who displays high levels of integrity, flexibility, innovation, enthusiasm and presence,” she says. “This brand also encompasses a person who is a strong and effective communicator, committed to excellence and consistently goes above and beyond.”

The people who get the best job offers either have those skills at a high level – or they were really good at giving the impression that they possess them during the interview.

“The ‘fake it to make it’ people are the ones who learned how to act like a person with those skills and became really good at it,” she says, and while she doesn’t actually endorse the practise, she rues that it has become the norm. “They’ve come to understand that they need to say and do all the right things in their interviews – regardless of the truth. And for the most part, they are right.”

As Richard Scott Taylor of UAE-based human development consultants InnessKirk says, “The question is simple – ethics. If the applicant has ethics, lying is never an option.”

In UAE culture, presenting yourself as honest and trustworthy is not just desirable, but expected. And that’s all very well… until you find out that the next person in the interview queue is bigging himself up as the guy who taught Steve Jobs all he knew.

Your résumé is either the bridge or the barrier between you and your chances of an interview, and it’s vital that you get it right – or, as the advice pages of UAE-based job website Bayt puts it, “Your CV is often the first interaction with your prospective employer and in a highly competitive market, the importance of creating a good impression can never be overestimated.”

Once again, however, you have an element of control over the way in which your CV paints you. And you should never forget that certain truths about your career really have no business being on there.

As with interviews, it’s best to stick most resolutely to those facts that paint you in a positive light.

For example, she says, if you’re a perfect candidate with regards your experience and qualifications, but list your hobbies as reading, playing Minecraft and going for long walks on your own, you’re likely to be flagged up as unsuitable for a job where team players are important.

And yet your personality may soon be removed from the interview equation entirely. According to business journal The Atlantic, we are entering an age of ‘Big Data’ when it comes to the recruitment process, with HR departments keen to make the most of the latest scientific thinking when hiring people.

There is even a start-up in Silicon Valley that has devised a series of computer games which, when played by job candidates, will help identify the strongest. No grinning interview persona needed.

The Atlantic article goes on to explain how software engineers can, without their knowledge, be identified and rated by a series of complicated algorithms that look at open-source coding they have written and which appears online. With the right tools, any interested HR department could also look at the coders’ popularity on internet forums and the language they use on LinkedIn and Twitter to ascertain their level of skill.

So you might one day be headhunted because of your commanding social media presence; you’ve already ticked all the right boxes before they’ve even met you.

But that’s for tomorrow. For today, it’s probably better to make the most of what you’ve got, and work with it.

By making the decision to actually put personal development as a priority in your life, she says, and working hard at becoming the person you said you were in the job interview, that’s when your real success will begin.