Lei Xiangping

    lagon235@163.com

    RECENTLY, one of my relatives, who will graduate from college this July, turned to me for job-seeking advice. I told him the first step to impress HR personnel is to prepare a good resume, in which qualifications and experiences matching the position’s requirements should be authentically written. I was delighted that my experience could help him.

    However, when he asked me whether he could add experiences to the resume that he actually didn’t have to make him look competitive, I emphatically dissuaded him from doing that because in my opinion honesty should be the top principle when landing a job. What really shocked me is that many of his classmates have faked their resumes to gain interview opportunities.

    I didn’t realize the severity of this problem until I read a news piece by China Youth Daily saying that resume falsification exists among many college graduates.

    The news report said that in many colleges, falsifying resumes has become an unspoken secret, and some students even compete in beautifying their resumes because they think they could lose out on opportunities if they do not cheat to level the playing field. The report said it was not rare for graduates to exaggerate their role in a school club or to claim that a short-term training experience at a top university meant they “graduated.”

    In the short term, resume falsifications possibly will help students gain more attention from recruiters and win them interview opportunities.

    However, landing jobs at the expense of sacrificing honesty is disgraceful to college students themselves and detrimental to social fairness. Honesty is an intangible asset for any individual to survive in society.

    For those individuals who act dishonestly in their job application, being dishonest will remain a stain on their character that can’t be erased for the rest of their lives.

    When a large number of students are cheating and getting hired, those who don’t follow trend and fail to land a job may attribute being honest to their failure, so more honest students will join in the vicious cycle of resorting to cheating.

    In spite of the bad consequences resulting from resume faking, there are some people who sympathize with resume falsifiers because they think landing a job is becoming increasingly difficulty for college students.

    It is true that job market competition is turning fierce. Over 7.65 million newly graduated students will pour into the job market this July; add them to the still unemployed from previous years and the nearly 300,000 overseas returnee graduates, the total number of jobseekers will reach 10 million this year. Some employers are also becoming picky. But these two can’t be cogent reasons for college students to justify their cheating.

    The phenomenon of faking resumes among college students deserves to be taken seriously. Designing a resume is an artful job that should properly tailor jobseekers’ authentic experiences and qualifications to the job requirements, but the fundamental principle is that cheating should not be allowed and those who benefit from cheating should be punished. In a normal society, dishonest people should pay price for dishonesty.

    (The author is an editor with the News Desk at China Radio International.)