‘Horrendous’: the ‘ridiculously common’ lies people tell on CVs, and what happens when they are discovered

A survey earlier this month found that 18% of people in the UK had lied in order to get a job, or knew someone who had, in the past 12 months. Photograph: Tero Vesalainen/Alamy

In 28 years of recruitment, Matt Collingwood has witnessed some “very awkward” job interviews. Like the candidate whose CV falsely boasted of a second-dan black belt in taekwondo, only to discover his interviewer was an aficionado of the sport. “An interview that should have been an hour lasted 15 minutes,” said Collingwood, the managing director of the IT recruitment agency Viqu.

Or the candidate who claimed he had attended a certain private school, which his interviewer had also attended and would have been in the year above. But when asked for teachers’ names, the school motto, even where the sports field was, “he was clueless. Didn’t get the job.”