It’s a fact: People “lie on resumés”, whether the format is a LinkedIn profile, or an old-fashioned document.
Checkster reports that 78% of people who applied for a job in 2020 “lied on their resume about experience” or skills.
Another poll by LendEDU found that 34% of LinkedIn users “lie on their resume”, to some extent, on their profiles. Of that number, 55% said they padded out their ‘Skills’ section. To win roles, it seems, many of us are not above a little trickery.
In 2024, when talent acquisition specialists and hiring managers have hours (and sometimes less) to assess candidates, interview them, and woo them, the risk of resumé skill-creep is magnified.
For a rushed and overworked hiring manager, who is fed up with losing talent and looking bad because of it, the process of vetting becomes less about careful analysis and more about keyword-matching. This raises the question: “why do people lie on their CVs?” The answer might lie in the intense competition for jobs and the perceived need to stand out.
All of this culminates in a series of statistics that should not be surprising: According to a 2022 Aptitude Research report of more than 300 HR leaders at major companies, 50% of companies have lost quality talent due to the way they interview and hire.
At the same time, 50% of companies do not measure the ROI of their interview process. One third are not confident in their interviewing game as a whole.
The process is broken.
The resumé is at the heart of a greater efficiency problem. That same Aptitude Research report examined the average company recruitment funnel, laying out the points at which candidates typically drop out. It found that, on average:
22% of candidates drop out at the application stage
24% drop out at the screening stage
25% at the interview stage
So you might be losing anywhere from 20 to 40% of your talent pool while you spend time vetting resumés and sifting through cover letters.
Aside from the fact that this is a massive time-waster and a prime source of frustration for hiring managers, enforcing the use of resumés is not an effective way to ensure quality of hire.
That’s for two reasons:
78% of people “do people lie on their resume”, as we mentioned above.
Even if they don’t, average humans cannot look at resumés and determine exactly how good a candidate will be at the job for which they’re applying. According to research by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, past experience accounts for just 3% of on-the-job performance. Put simply, what has happened cannot predict what will happen.
Therefore, our over-reliance on resumés creates problems when we go to interview candidates. It’s a classic problem: Overworked hiring managers formulate questions on-the-fly after making cursory glances at candidate submissions.
It’s little wonder that 25% of candidates bail at this point – often, they’re just reconfirming information they’ve already told you about who they are and what they’ve done.
There is an alternative: Structured interviews. Schmidt and Hunter found that structured interviews are the best predictor (26%) of on-the-job success.
The biggest companies are starting to focus more on this.
According to the Wall Street Journal, employers like Google, Delta, and IBM are combatting the tight labor market by easing strict needs for college degrees, focusing instead on interview and assessment processes that accurately measure soft skills and behavioral traits.
can you lie on linkedin ?
In the digital arena of professional profiles, LinkedIn emerges as the modern-day résumé, a curated collection of experiences and skills for the world to see. The veracity of these profiles, however, often comes into question. While Checkster’s 2020 survey unveiled that 78% of job applicants might lie on their résumés, the trend translates seamlessly to LinkedIn, where the stakes are just as high and the scrutiny potentially even more public.
LendEDU’s poll sheds light on this digital deception, indicating that a third of LinkedIn profiles are peppered with half-truths, especially within the ‘Skills’ section. In the rapid-fire realm of talent acquisition, where hiring managers and specialists are inundated with profiles, the lure to lie on LinkedIn about experience is magnified under the pressure of competition.
In the efficiency-driven process of recruitment, LinkedIn profiles serve as a quick filter, a snapshot of potential. Yet, this convenience comes at a cost. With half of the companies reporting a loss of quality talent due to flawed interview and hiring practices, as highlighted by Aptitude Research in 2022, the reliance on LinkedIn for pre-interview assessments is fraught with risk. The platform’s ease of access to a candidate’s professional narrative, while beneficial, also opens the door for inflated qualifications to slip through, unchecked.
The résumé, whether digital or document, sits at the crux of an efficacy dilemma. The same research posits that past experiences, as listed on LinkedIn, account for a mere fraction of actual job performance. Thus, the embellishments on LinkedIn, while aiming to secure an interview, may ultimately undermine a candidate’s prospects, as hiring managers seek substantive evidence of skills and capabilities.
In conclusion, as the job market evolves and companies like Google and IBM pivot towards skill and behavioral assessment over formal qualifications, the integrity of one’s LinkedIn profile becomes crucial. It’s a clarion call for honesty, as the professional world increasingly values authenticity and the accurate portrayal of one’s abilities and experiences.
Getting started with structured interviews
In its simplest form, the structured interview is based around a predefined set of questions.
These questions are typically behavioural and situational in nature: It’s about giving candidates the opportunity to explore how they think, solve problems, formulate plans, and deal with success and failure.
Therefore, questions like ‘Tell me how you’d respond if [specific situation] occurred’ don’t belong in a structured interview.
Instead, you might ask, ‘Tell me about when something went wrong with work, and you had to fix it. How did you go about it?’
Importantly, the questions you ask must be the same for all candidates. A critical component of the structured interview is fair and balanced comparison of candidates.
If you ask each candidate something different – as so often happens in a fast-paced hourly hiring setup – you can never accurately compare one candidate against another.
In that uncertainty, bias creeps in. It becomes a case of ‘I like this guy, he leans forward when he speaks.’
We’ve developed a handy tool to help you get started with structured interviews today: Our HEXACO job interview rubric. It comes with step-by-step instructions to help you figure out what skills and traits you need based on your open roles and company values.
From there, we’ve supplied you with more than 20 science-backed questions and a scorecard. It’s something simple enough for a busy hiring manager to use.
Remove the resumé entirely, and succeed
There is a possible world in which the resumé serves hiring managers as a kind of back-up validation document, used purely to verify the veracity of a candidate’s skills and experience.
In this world, the first stage of your recruitment funnel is the actual candidate interview.
That’s what our Ai Smart Interviewer can do. It’s a conversational Ai that takes candidates through a chat-based interview, using questions tailored to your open roles.
Candidates give their responses – with plenty of time to think – and Smart Interviewer analyses their word choices and sentence structures using its machine learning brainpower.
A candidate may be able to lie about their years of experience, or their knowledge of CSS, but our Smart Interviewer can accurately determine their cognitive ability, language proficiency, and personality traits.
Then it can make recommendations to you on the best candidates, according to the criteria you’ve set – and, at this point, you haven’t even looked at a single resumé.
But, as with traditional processes, you have the final say in who you hire.
In 2024
, the name of the game is efficiency. Success will be measured in time saved NOT having to screen, review resumes and cover letters, compile candidate feedback, communicate with candidates, or improve hiring manager interview techniques.
When you’re saving that much time and money, your recruitment (or HR) function has more bandwidth to focus on long-term talent acquisition and people initiatives.
Don’t struggle in 2024 – speak to our team today about how we can solve your hiring challenges.
Related
Blog
Reinventing the Competency Framework: A Data-Driven Approach for the AI Era
We can’t hide from reality anymore. Talent needs are shifting overnight, and AI is redefining what it means to work. Traditional talent frameworks are no longer fit for purpose. At Sapia.ai, we believe the future of talent strategy lies in a smarter, fairer, and more adaptive way of defining what great looks like.
Our AI hiring platform is built on the largest proprietary dataset of interview answers globally – we’re a data company at heart, and we’ve seen the power of data-driven people methodology in transforming how organisations hire and retain good talent.
So, when it came to building a new Competency Framework that could be leveraged globally for hiring for any role at any scale, of course, we used a ground-up, data-led methodology that bridges the gap between organisational psychology and AI.
Why Rethink Competency Frameworks?
Conventional frameworks are typically crafted through expert interviews and focus groups. While valuable, they tend to be subjective, static, and too slow to keep pace with evolving job demands. As roles become more fluid and technology augments or replaces task-based skills, organisations need a new way to understand the human capabilities that genuinely matter for performance.
We wanted to identify enduring, job-agnostic competencies that reflect what drives success in a modern workplace – capabilities like adaptability, resilience, learning agility, and customer orientation.
(Why competencies and not just skills? Read why here.)
Our Approach: Where AI Meets I/O Psychology
Sapia.ai’s methodology is rooted in the science of human behaviour but powered by cutting-edge AI. We asked two core questions:
- Can we make competency discovery agile, scalable, and evidence-based?
- Can we use AI to automate the process without losing the rigour of traditional psychology?
The answer to both: yes.
We began with a rich dataset of over 37,000 job descriptions across industries and role types. Using large language models (LLMs) and advanced NLP techniques, we extracted over 200,000 behavioural descriptors. These were distilled down through a four-step process:
- Behavioural Descriptor Extraction
- Clustering and Labeling
- Cluster Analysis by I/O Psychologists
- Thematic Categorisation and Definition of Competencies
This resulted in a refined list of 25 human-centric competencies, each with clear behavioural indicators and practical relevance across a wide range of roles.
Built to Scale. Built to Adapt.
Our framework is intelligent, but importantly, it’s adaptive. Organisations can apply this methodology to their own job descriptions to discover custom competencies. This bottom-up, role-data-led approach ensures alignment to real work, not just theoretical models.
And because the framework integrates directly with our AI-powered hiring tools, you get a connected system that brings your talent strategy to life.
Our framework comes to life in the following tools:
- Job Analyser – Starting with a job description, it creates a unique competency profile for each role to build tailored structured interviews in seconds.
- Structured Chat-based Interviews that assess candidates’ responses according to the competency profile for consistent candidate assessment.
- Talent Insights Reports from every interview with deep reasoning and explainability for fair and objective hiring decisions.
- Phai Career Coach for internal mobility and employee growth that considers their competency strengths and career aspirations.
The Future of Talent Acquisition & Development is Competency-First
Skills alone cannot predict success. Competencies do. As AI continues transforming how we work, Sapia.ai’s Competency Framework offers a scalable, scientific, and fair foundation for hiring and developing the talent of tomorrow.
Want to see how it works? Download the full framework.
Blog
It’s Time to Stop Hiring for Skills, and Start Hiring for Competencies
If you’re a CHRO or Head of Recruitment at an enterprise today, chances are you’ve been inundated with messages about the importance of “skills-based hiring.” LinkedIn’s recent Work Change Report (2025) is full of compelling data: a 140% increase in the rate at which professionals are adding new skills to their profiles since 2022, and a projection that by 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs today will have changed.
This is essential reading. But there’s a missed opportunity: the singular focus on “skills” fails to acknowledge the real metric that talent leaders need to be using to future-proof their workforce — competencies.
Skills vs Competencies: The Crucial Distinction
- Skills are task-specific capabilities. Think Python programming, Excel, or even negotiation.
- Soft skills refer to interpersonal or behavioural qualities like adaptability, communication, and resilience.
But skills on their own — even soft ones — are generic, disjointed, and often disconnected from real-world performance. In contrast:
- Competencies are clusters of skills, knowledge, behaviours and abilities that are observable, measurable, and context-specific.
Put simply, competencies answer the all-important question: Can this person apply the right skills, in the right way, at the right time, to deliver results in our environment?
Why Competencies Matter More Than Ever
The Work Change Report outlines a future where job titles are fluid, roles evolve quickly, and AI is a constant disruptor. This creates three massive challenges for hiring at scale:
- Roles are changing faster than static skill frameworks can keep up
- Job candidates may have non-linear, cross-functional backgrounds
- The shelf-life of technical skills is shrinking rapidly
Skills alone don’t tell us whether someone can succeed in a role that will look different 12 months from now. But competencies can. Because they measure not just what a person knows, but how they apply it.
Adaptive Talent: The New Competitive Advantage
The LinkedIn report highlights a critical insight: organisations now prioritise agility in entry-level hiring. And there’s a good reason for that. With professionals expected to hold twice as many jobs over their careers compared to 15 years ago, adaptability is not just a nice-to-have. It’s core to success.
But you can’t measure agility with a keyword on a CV. You measure it by looking at competencies like:
- Learning agility
- Change resilience
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Problem-solving in ambiguous contexts
When you shift the focus away from skills to behavioural competencies that can be defined, observed, and assessed in structured ways, you open yourself up to a much more dynamic and more useful way of managing talent.
Building a Competency-Based Talent Framework
To hire effectively at scale, particularly in a technology-driven world of work, talent leaders must shift their lens:
- Define Role-Specific Competencies: Move beyond job descriptions based on qualifications or vague skill sets. Break roles down into measurable competencies that reflect current and emerging performance expectations. This step is crucial for organisations to be able to accurately assess role-fit in the next stages. Sapia.ai does this automatically, taking job descriptions and building role-specific competency models in seconds.
- Assess Competencies Fairly and Objectively: Use structured behavioural interviews, ideally at scale. These provide a much more accurate picture of a candidate’s readiness than self-reported skills or credentials. Sapia.ai’s AI powered interviews enable competency assessment, at scale.
- Build Pathways for Development and Internal Mobility: A competency framework makes it easier to identify transferable strengths, development gaps, and future-fit potential. It gives employees clarity on how to grow within the business. Using an AI-powered coach can help ensure that talent is being continuously developed against the organisation’s competency framework.
The Future of Work Requires Depth, Not Just Breadth
LinkedIn’s data shows that people are learning more skills more quickly than ever. But the real question for talent leaders like you is: Are those skills being applied in ways that drive value? Are we hiring for task proficiency or performance?
The truth is that the organisations that will thrive in an AI-driven, skills-fluid economy aren’t the ones chasing the next hot skill. They’re the ones designing systems to identify, develop and scale competence.
Keen to Shift to Competencies, but Lacking a Framework?
Sapia.ai has developed a comprehensive Competency Framework using a data-driven approach. Download the full paper here.
Blog
The AGC Debate: Are AI-Written Interview Answers a Red Flag or Smart Strategy?
Every day, we read stories of increased fake or AI-assisted applications. Tools like LazyApply are just one of many flooding the market, driving up applicant volumes to never-before-seen levels.
As an overwhelmed hiring function, how do you find the needle in the haystack without using an army of recruiters to filter through the maze?
At Sapia.ai, we help global enterprises do just that. Many of the world’s most trusted brands, such as Qantas Group, have relied on our hiring platform as a co-pilot for better hiring since 2020.
Our Chat Interview has given millions of candidates a voice they wouldn’t have had – enabling them to share in their own words why they’re the best fit for the role. To find the people who belong with their brands, our customers must trust that their candidates represent themselves. Thus, they want to trust that our AI is analysing real human answers—not answers from a machine.
The Rise of GPT
When ChatGPT went viral in November 2022, we immediately adopted a defensive strategy. We had long been flagging plagiarised candidate responses, but then, we needed to act fast to flag responses using artificially generated content (‘AGC’).
Many companies were in the same position, but Sapia.ai was the only company with a large proprietary data set of interview answers that pre-dated GPT and similar tools: 2.5 billion words written by real humans.
That data enabled us to build a world-first:- an LLM-based AGC detector for text-based interviews, recently upgraded to v2.0 with 99% accuracy and a false positive rate of 1%. An NLP classification model built on Sapia.ai proprietary data that operates across all Sapia.ai chat interviews.
Full Transparency with Candidates
Because we value candidate trust as much as customer trust, we wanted to be transparent with candidates about our ability to detect artificially generated content (AGC). As an LLM, we could identify AGC in real time and warn candidates that we had detected it.
This has had a powerful impact on candidate behaviour. Since our AGC detector went live, we have seen that the real-time flagging acts as a real-time disincentive to use tools like ChatGPT to generate interview responses.
The detector generates a warning if 3 or more answers are flagged as having artificially generated content. The Sapia.ai Chat Interview uses 5 open-ended interview questions for volume hiring roles, such as retail, contact centre, and customer service, and 6 questions for professional roles, such as engineers, data scientists, graduates, etc.
Let’s Take a Closer Look at the Data…
We see that using our AGC detector LLM to communicate live with candidates in the interview flow when artificial content has been detected has a positive effect on deterring candidates from using AI tools to generate their answers.
The rate of AGC use declines from 1 question flagged to 5 questions – raising the flag on one question is generally enough to deter candidates from trying again.
The graph below shows the number of candidates, from a total of almost 2.7m, that used artificially generated content in their answers.
Differences in AGC Usage Rate by Groups
We see no meaningful differences in candidate behaviour based on the job they are applying for or based on geography.
However, we have found differences by gender and ethnicity – for example, men use artificially generated content more than women. The graph below shows the overall completion ratios by gender – for all interviews on the left and for interviews where the number of questions with AGC detected is 5 or more on the right.
Perception of Artificially Generated Content by Hirers.
We’re curious to understand how hirers perceive the use of these tools to assist candidates in a written interview. The creation of the detector was based on the majority of Sapia.ai customers wanting transparency & explainability around the use of these tools by candidates, often because they want to ensure that candidates are using their own words to complete their interviews and they want to avoid wasting time progressing candidates who are not as capable as their chat interview suggests.
However, some of our customers feel that it’s a positive reflection of the candidate, showing that they are using the tools available to them to put their best foot forward.
It’s a mix of perspectives.
Our detector labels it as the use of artificially generated content. It’s up to our customers how they use that information in their decision-making processes.
This concept of having a human in the loop is one of the key dimensions of ethical AI, and we ensure that it is used in every AI-related hiring product we build.
Interested in the science behind it all? Download our published research on developing the AGC detector 👇