Is Lying On My CV The Best Option To Landing A Job Faster?

By Tabitha Makumi,
Let’s agree on one thing, if you’ve been job searching for let’s say a year and a half without success, you will surely get desperate . You start to wonder what in the world you are doing wrong. Is it the kind of jobs you apply for which are not a good fit for you?

But what if someone told you that they had a solution for you, a kind of panacea that would cure your joblessness?

My name is Jamleck Kamau* and for the past two years I have been tarmacking for a marketing job without much success. Not even a call for an interview,” wrote Mr Kamau in an email to Career Point Kenya a couple of days back.

He went on to write that, “It is by sharing my job search ordeal with a friend whom I graduated with that I got counseled to do something I hadn’t thought of. After producing my CV to him so that he could advice me where necessary, he laughed at first after taking a glance at my not too detailed CV.”

“Is this what you’ve been using,” he asked perplexed and I nodded.  Why had he laughed? Was the structure not good? Had I listed  the wrong people as my referees….what was it?

“Your CV needs something more than this,” he said and after inquiring what he meant by ‘more’ he told me I had to make my CV more juicy….or in his words…lie.

He confessed that “I have done it before and it helped me land my current job.” He went on to say, “ What I did was exaggerate on my experience majorly on duties and responsibilities to make me more preferable for the jobs which I was targeting and I won’t lie to you, I used to be very truthful  but when I started doing this (lying) after getting counseled by people who had landed jobs through doing the same, I started getting called for interviews and now here I am.”

Kamau writes, “It didn’t seem like the right thing to do since I had read a number of articles advising against such but where had that gotten me? I was still jobless. I followed my friend’s advice and decided to lie on my CV. I was careful though and didn’t want to exaggerate things too much. I only went along with what the advert was looking for and tailored my CV to look like I was the right candidate for the job…even if I wasn’t.”

Mr Kamau then poses, “Which got me thinking, is lying on your CV the best way to getting a job faster in Kenya? And secondly, are many Kenyans jobless because they choose to stay honest on their CV?”

Talk to us Kenyans, what are your thoughts on this?