I wonder how many recruitment consultants haven't found a lie, misrepresentation or exaggeration on a CV in the last year? I bet very few, and many reading last weekend's article in the newspapers will have rolled their eyes at how common this practice actually is.
Job-seekers reading that article may also have crept blushingly to their computers and hastily made a few adjustments to their own, rather embellished CV. Prisons, after all, are not nice places, they smell, make you go pale, and you might take up smoking, self-tattooing, and other unpleasant habits.
So what are the reasons for it? I suppose it's the same reason why people illegally download music, text while driving, or fiddle their tax return; they believe they won't get caught. Otherwise known as the Homer Simpson Defence. I reckon Ms Mackay had absolutely no idea she could be imprisoned for her actions.
Of course many current job-seekers came through an education system reeling from repeated government experiments in 'child-centred learning', which in many people's opinion created an entire generation who "knew their rights but not their responsibilities." This has arguably created a system where people really do believe that if getting the job they want is their right, then surely they have a right to break the rules, because after all, it’s their right?
Wrong! Go to jail...go directly to jail...and don't even think about collecting £200.
It may also be that the number of hoops people are being asked to jump through by an increasingly layered and inefficient recruitment process is forcing people to feel they must lie. Is it possible that the claims by many employers that they want to be ‘diverse’ and for people to ‘be themselves’, actually want anything but? There is an amazing amount of pressure on young people (and not so young people) today to tick so many, largely invented, boxes.
Why are two A levels specifically necessary for a job? Why is being a graduate essential, when three-five years of work experience might actually be a better thing than a degree for this particular role? Why must someone have two years experience, when it may turn out to be two years experience of doing it really badly?
If you create (or allow to evolve) a system where lies, excuses and general apathy towards ethics are enabled by those in power, people creep inexorably to the lowest common behavioural denominator.
It could also be a symptom of the "It's not my fault" culture. It used to amaze when I was at University that the academic staff would repeatedly accept the same old excuses from the same old students for not handing in an assignment on time. As I have said before in this blog, there are a finite number of dying grannies available at any one time.
Before this entry begins to sound like a Saturday Mail 'think' piece, being a qualified educator I'm professionally acquainted with the way in which the power, status and 'benefit of the doubt' was shifted to the child, or student in the 1990s. This, many argue, aided the fracturing of the Institutional adult and child relationship, which culminated in (amongst other things) the child-abuse witch-hunts of the previous decade, when Paediatricians had their houses stoned by baying mobs, because the ignorant fools couldn't spell Paediatrician, or Paedophile. In fact, let's face it, they couldn't spell at all.
Maybe the education system should blush about that too. But I digress.
Let me end with a comment on the pressure perhaps felt by many aspirational people growing up on a diet of shows like The Apprentice. The Apprentice may once have been a fresh idea. However I now hope that Alan ‘Baron’ Sugar is cringing with embarrassment at presiding over generational example-setting from what amounts to (with very few exceptions) a collection of verbose, self-aggrandising people, whose own CVs, if found to contain interesting departures from the truth, could land them, very publicly, behind bars.
Perhaps 'SrAlan' needs a new phrase; not 'you're fired', but 'you're nicked!'
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