How to tell if a résumé is exaggerated

Fabrication is rare, inflation is not

A résumé that invents an employer or a degree tends to fall apart on the first check. The harder case is the one where the employer is real, the dates are right, and only the scale is wrong: the project shipped, but with four people rather than ten; the improvement happened, but on a test environment. No single word in it is false, and the reader still finishes with a picture the record does not support. That gap is what you are looking for.

Start with the claims the decision rests on

You cannot check every line, and you do not need to. Pick the claims that would change your mind if they turned out smaller than they read — the ones carrying the seniority, the scope or the number you are hiring for. Skip adjectives entirely; "passionate" and "world-class" have nothing to compare against. A claim worth checking is concrete: a title, a date range, a team size, a named system, a percentage, a shipped product.

Find the record first, then compare

For each claim, look for a public trace: a company page, a launch announcement, a conference bio, a repository, a press release, an archived version of a team page. Read the trace before you re-read the claim, so that you are comparing rather than confirming.

That is four claims in one line — led, ten, rebuilt, forty percent — and they can hold or fail separately. A launch post naming six engineers does not make the line false. It makes one number unsupported, and leaves the other three standing.

Write down the wording the record supports

The useful output of a check is a sentence, not a verdict. "Public sources place the team at six and name this person as one of two leads" is something you can put in front of a hiring panel and something a candidate can answer. "Exaggerated" is neither. Keep the claim, the source and the supported wording together, so that whoever reads your notes later can see what you actually saw.

Plenty of real work leaves no public trace: internal tools, private repositories, small companies, regulated industries, anything under an NDA. When you cannot find a record, the honest label is unverified, and it should carry no weight against the candidate. Ask about it in the interview instead, where the person can answer.

If a third party produced the check

When a vendor, a service or a tool assembles this kind of report on a candidate for employment purposes, it is generally a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and the disclosure, notice and dispute duties in what the FCRA requires when a claim fails attach before you act on it. Gram operates as a consumer reporting agency for exactly that reason.