Résumé verification: how to check what a candidate claims
Gram
In short: Résumé verification means comparing each concrete claim on a résumé to a public record of it and writing down the wording the record actually supports.
Almost nothing on a résumé is false. Most of what goes wrong is inflation: a real job with a rounder title, a team of three described as ten, a review comment described as a contribution. Fabrication is rare and easy to catch; exaggeration is common and quiet, and it is what a careful reviewer is actually looking for.
This guide covers how to check claims against public evidence, what the law requires of you when you do, and what to do when a claim does not hold. Each page below answers one question in its first sentence and cites what it relies on.
Checking a résumé against the public record comes down to four steps.
- Start with the claims the decision rests on. Those are the concrete ones that would change your mind if they turned out smaller than they read, such as a title, a date range, a team size or a number; adjectives have nothing to compare against.
- Find the record first, then compare. Read the public trace, whether a company page, a launch post, a repository or an archived team page, before you re-read the claim, so that you are comparing rather than confirming.
- Write down the wording the record supports. The result is a sentence such as "public sources place the team at six", kept with the claim and its source, rather than a verdict like "exaggerated", which a hiring panel cannot weigh and a candidate cannot answer.
- When nothing is public, the claim stays unverified. It should not turn into doubt in your notes or carry weight against the candidate; ask instead, since a person who did the work can usually name a colleague, a system or an artifact that settles it.
Each kind of claim leaves its record in a different place, and each record proves only so much.
| Claim | Where the public record usually is | What it can establish | When nothing is public |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job title and dates | Team pages, announcements, conference bios, filings, archived snapshots | A title at a dated moment; snapshots bracket a tenure, though absence from one is weak | Unverified, not doubtful; ask the candidate |
| Team size and leadership | Launch posts, org pages and their archives, talk bios, job postings, commit history | A floor and a shape for the team, not a headcount; "lead" only where others use the word | Unverified, the usual case inside a company; it must not tilt the decision |
| Open-source contributions | The project's commit log, pull requests, review threads and maintainers file, not the profile calendar | Once the identity is matched, whether the work is there and whether it was merged | Unverified, and final, when the work was private or under an employer's account |
The guides
- 01How to tell if a résumé is exaggeratedCompare each concrete claim to a public record of it; inflation shows up as a gap between the claim's scale and the record's, not as an outright lie.
- 02How common is lying on résumés?Surveys put outright fabrication in the minority of résumés and some form of embellishment in the majority, so the common case is inflation rather than invention.
- 03Résumé verification vs. background check: what each one coversA background check confirms identity, criminal history and employment dates through official records; résumé verification tests whether the described work happened at the described scale.
- 04How to verify a job title and dates without calling the employerPublic professional profiles, press releases, company pages, conference bios and archived web pages usually corroborate a title and tenure without a phone call.
- 05How to verify a candidate's open-source contributionsA project's commit history, pull requests and issue tracker are public, so a contribution claim either appears there under the candidate's identity or it does not.
- 06"Led a team of 10": how to check a team-size claimTeam-size and leadership claims are checkable when the team was public, through org pages, launch posts and conference bios, and when it was not the honest answer is "unverified", not "false".
- 07FCRA: what you owe a candidate when a résumé claim failsIf a third party produced the report, you owe the candidate a pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report and the summary of rights, a reasonable time to dispute it, and then an adverse action notice if you go ahead.
- 08AI résumé screening, bias, and New York City's AEDT lawNew York City's Local Law 144 requires a published bias audit and candidate notice before an automated employment decision tool is used, and a tool that only surfaces evidence for a human decision is designed to stay outside that definition.