People, Parts, Provenance

Dateline: New York, 2nd November 2023.Well, this is ironic (and not just merely annoying, like rain on your wedding day). Marianna Spring, the BBC’s first disinformation correspondent, has been called out for embellishing the truth on her resume while applying for a job few years ago.  Is that really disinformation though? I mean, come on, we’ve all jazzed up our capabilities on a resume haven’t we? It’s the normal course of human affairs, candidates lying to their prospective employer just like hiring managers lying to the candidates that they are interviewing. Maybe that’s about to end though, as continuous real-time online reputation management becomes the norm and the provenance of people (as well as things) becomes public, unforgeable and immutable.SharePeople And ProvenanceGiven that candidate fraud has pretty much doubled since the pandemic (and that a fifth of job hunters cheat on tests), recruitment clearly has some challenges. Since it’s been years since I actually interviewed a candidate, I can’t say what the modern approach to this sort of thing is. If I were hiring someone tomorrow, I’d probably look at their LinkedIn profile rather than their resume, since I would have thought it much more difficult and risky to adjust your LinkedIn profile to show your years as Elon Musk’s right-hand man than to add a bit of embellishment to your Google Docs resume. Although it seems there’s a lot of tweaking there too. While LinkedIn estimates that only 15-20% of candidates are dishonest in the way they present themselves, which I am sure must be…People, Parts, Provenance