Not everyone lies. To say everyone does is just lying to yourself in an attempt at rationalisation.

Tell the truth. If you perform poorly in an interview, you now know where your weaknesses are. Work on them. Do a hobby project that lets you gain experience in that area. Use that as an example in your interview. Not only can you be truthful, you'll be more confident as you'll actually understand what you're talking about and can turn it into a positive - "I was weak in this area, so I went off an studied it myself" reveals more about your character than just the specific thing you learned.

Half the issue is companies where you won't even get to an interview without a juiced-up CV, and the rest is a interviewing and hiring decision process that doesn't penalize liars. If people felt your advice was the best way to get ahead, then they'd follow it, but when they see people who are just good bullshitters rocket past them in the system, they're not gonna feel good about it.

(How accurate this perception is is an important point: I'm inclined to believe that this nihilistic "everything is bullshit" philosophy is incorrect and self-defeating, but it's hard to deny many high-profile examples that show that bullshitting can be stunningly successful, while honesty and hard work can fail horribly)

This still doesn't justify lying to a potential employer. If your CV won't get you to an interview, then you don't have the skills they are looking for.

Aside from lying, you have other choices - spend some time working on personal projects to get the skills you need, obtain a recognised qualification in the skills you need, or try to find some way to obtain those skills in your current job. All of those will increase your real value to the potential employers, and gain you the opportunity to get the interview you want.

If a company catches you lying in an interview, they're absolutely right to blacklist you forever. How do you expect them to ever trust you to be telling the truth in the future if your very first contact with them is built on a lie?

You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted.

I'll note I generally have not been desperate enough to try this, firstly because I'm the kind of person who tends to have a pretty big list of skills in the first place (jack of all trades, master of none), and secondly there's generally enough companies I can apply to which have vaguely functioning hiring processes. But I can't say I look at the way some companies hire and say "Well, candidates lying is entirely a problem with them". People respond to incentives and consequences, and when you have a system with a strong incentive to lie and not much risk of consequences, don't be surprised when people do, even if it's not right.

> It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against.

This is still based on a false assumption, because you want to justify it to yourself.

If the company had lots of CVs being submitted but not a single person made it through their screening, they'd realise their screening bar was either too high (as you assume) or that their bar was correct but they couldn't find the candidate they wanted. Maybe their standards are too high, in which case they might then re-evaluate their expectations are repeat their hiring process with a lower acceptance criteria.

If they're only looking to fill a single role, it doesn't matter if the process screens out 99.9% of the candidates as long as they get through at least one candidate that fulfills the requirement. Of course, if the situation is as you describe, for such a rare talent, the candidate is possibly looking for money than they're prepared to pay, at which point they can again calibrate their expectations lower or decide to pay more. But that's a business decision for the company to decide, not you as a jobseeker.

But the people who know what the company is looking for, and how many people get through their filtering is the company themselves, not you. Just because you don't have the skills required and you extrapolate that to "no-one has these skills", it doesn't mean you're correct and it doesn't mean you're justified in lying.

You then say that you haven't "been desperate enough to try this". In that case, you shouldn't be defending this behaviour either - it will be hurting you when the jobs you are qualified for and have a legitimate shot at getting end up getting filled by a candidate who's not actually up to the task and managed to lie and BS their way through the interview. How is that a good outcome for you or for the company?

You're really missing the point here. It isn't about the idea world, it's about things as they actually are. Mental gymnastics to justifying something is not the same as a sober assessment of the incentives and dynamics of a system.

Lying on your CV and in an interview isn't a "sober assessment of the incentives and dynamics of a system". It's deceit.

I never implied such an equivalence.

Perhaps you could reread GP? You seem to have misunderstood what he wrote. Surely discussing the motivations of those who act deceitfully is not itself deceit.

I think maybe you should re-read my posts too, because it seems you misunderstood what I wrote. "Surely discussing the motivations of those who act deceitfully is not itself deceit." suggests that you are arguing about a totally different thing to me. I've never once suggested that it's deceitful to discuss their motivations, I was arguing that the actions caused by those motivations are deceitful.

To be clear, I understand their motivations - essentially "I want this job whether I'm qualified for it or not", but lying about their experience is never acceptable IMHO.

Going further, to me it's not clear which specific post you mean by GP here, as this is now many levels deep and my argument hasn't changed since the my first post on this topic and the argument I've been responding to hasn't changed. Do you mean the GP of that or the GP of the post you replied to? I'll quote them both.

The GP of my original reply was: "Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?" which was answered by somebody justifying that behaviour.

The GP of your reply was: "You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted."

The view expressed by both of these, and that I am fundamentally in disagreement with, is that the companies are asking for the impossible and so it is acceptable to lie to get the job.

The problem with this view is that it's the candidate who's making this assessment. They have no idea if there are any suitable candidates, only that they are not suitable and they aren't prepared to accept that perhaps there is someone more qualified than themselves who is suitable.

Perhaps such a person who's more qualified wouldn't want to work in this job. Perhaps the company's requirements are in fact unrealistically high and they don't get any applicants. None of this is the candidate's concern. What is their concern is that they are not qualified for the role, and so should not be applying. Perhaps they think they're close to the requirements, and apply anyway with a letter such as "my skills aren't an exact match, but maybe you would consider me anyway".

If the company's requirements turn out to be unrealistic, they will realise that soon enough, and decide what alternatives they have. It might be that they re-advertise the role with requirements that the potential candidate now meets, in which case they can and should apply at that point.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the motivations are, the issue just boils down to "is it acceptable to lie so you can the outcome you want while negatively impacting the other party?" I'd argue no.

GP of my initial comment. I think I spotted the misunderstanding. I read you to be accusing GP but perhaps that wasn't your intent. The rest follows from there.

> the companies are asking for the impossible and so it is acceptable to lie to get the job.

The claim isn't that it's acceptable. It's not "this is ideal and good and you should aspire to it" but rather responding to your idealism by examining the dynamics.

I doubt anyone disagrees with you in principle. However in practice if you leave something valuable out in a bad part of town it's getting stolen. You can preach that theft is wrong until you're blue in the face but it doesn't change the reality.

A virtuous refusal to compromise your ethics means you lose out yet the situation is expected to remain the same. That's fine if you have plenty of other options but you can't realistically expect everyone to be in that position. It's not a matter of ethics but rather human behavior. The scenario where the company is forced to acknowledge that their hiring process is broken will almost certainly never come to pass.