For literal people like myself the line between a lie such as "my biggest flaw is I work too hard" or "I have never used illegal drugs" and a lie like "I worked at Acme Corp" can seem thin.
Totally similar things. Drugs are irrelevant for doing the job and same is work experience. What matters is skills but they can't be measured most of the time so proxy value "experience" has been invented. But everyone knows that it is only a proxy thing and that very likely you won't be hired if you can do the job but can't "prove" it. So social moral value of lying about work experience has fallen to insignificant levels, for majority of jobs. The only thing stopping people from lying about experience part is fear of getting caught or no need to do it in the first place.
Exactly. I've been pretty lucky in that I've had a lot of good experience, so my lying is with other things, such as making people think I plan to stick around at their company for a really long time when that's very unlikely.
I have to agree with the other poster: I think nearly everyone lies, it's just a matter of what they lie about, and how much. Don't forget that "lies of omission" are still lies. You're not going to get far by being completely truthful about everything. I was lucky that my educational background and work experience have been good (and of course that I come from the right socioeconomic background for this kind of work), but there's other places where I've had to be less than honest (like "why did you leave this job?"). I'm sure just about everyone is the same way to some extent.
They are both lies, but they are different since they aren't equal violation of the social contract. When an interviewer wants to know my biggest weakness, they don't actually want to know my biggest weakness, they want to know how I handle answering a political question where too much honesty is a bad thing. They want me to lie, but only so much. Saying something like 'I work too hard' is too big a lie. Bringing up something that is a real but minor workplace weakness and what I do to avoid it is the lie they want, and bringing up a real weakness is being too truthful.
But when I say I worked at $place and did $thing with $technology, they want to me to mostly truthful. They understand there is some embellishing or generalizing, but an outright falsehood is a major violation of expectations.
HR speak is about giving the desired answer, regardless if it is true, mostly true, or a straight up lie. In some way it is seen as an justifiable reason to lie where as most other lying is not considered justifiable.
I am clueless about certain things and perhaps this is one of them... but really? Outright lies of pure red-handed snake-oil fiction?
Surely there must be a line between the "HR speak" most must sing along to and reality that does not qualify as pure uncut straight-up lies.
Help me understand what you mean.