Job seekers: Get used to full disclosure

Fibbing on your resume is a really bad idea.

First, you will probably be found out by the army of commercial background screeners that employers deploy to scour resumes, check criminal records and pull credit histories.

Plus, you don't need to. Most bosses are pretty forgiving if you come clean about a minor brush with the law or a supervisor so nutty he sent you running for the door.

Yet resume tinkering is practically an epidemic. Superheated competition for jobs, especially those with big paychecks, tempts many to pump air into their resumes. A gig as an administrative assistant expands into a management title. A mail-order MBA is passed off as the real deal.

"We tend to disproportionately reward individuals with extraordinary records," observed Kirk Hanson, a business professor and executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. "There's a huge incentive that's increased over the years in claiming that you're a star, so individuals tend to knock pieces from their resume that are inconsistent with being a star and add things that are consistent with that image."

But the precipitous tumble of high-profile managers in recent years should send up red flags for every job-seeker.

Marilee Jones had to quit her job in April as the longtime admissions dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after acknowledging that she didn't have an undergraduate degree as she'd claimed. Jones, ironically, had won national attention crusading against the pressure on students to build their resumes for elite colleges.

David Edmondson's 11-year career with RadioShack Corp. tanked in 2006, when misrepresentations he'd made about his education came to light. He'd been the company's president and chief executive.

They are hardly alone.

An annual employer survey turned up "inconsistencies" in the work histories of nearly half of job-seekers last year, with 20% of applicants providing false or misleading information about their educational credentials. Discrepancies in verifying past employment were up 13% over 2005 and up 7% involving education, the poll by Kroll Background Screening and Fraud Solutions showed.

"It's astonishing to me the kind of things that people try to fabricate," said Scott Viebranz, Kroll's chief sales officer. "They don't believe it will be found."