Iago’s letter of intention and Munchausen’s CV

By Mioara
An employment agreement and work relationships are built upon trust, honesty and liability. What protection do you, as either employer or employee, have when candidates apply for vacancy, one gets the job, and you further discover that his CV was a false and misinterpreting statement of himself?

At first impression the most affected are the work colleagues of this new employee. They have to deal with expectations other than those declared, they have to tolerate claims on their own work and finally they have to deliver results and do the job for this new colleague many times.

Years ago, a law firm used to recruit lawyers based on a sort of letter of intention. The said letter was required to be in the English language about an interesting topic and was supposed to be elaborated by the applicant himself. We received great pieces of composition and narrative work on interesting topics: “devil’s advocate”, “age gap”, “football”, “human rights”, etc. The phrases were articulated with rich vocabulary and game words on edge; anyway, good proficiency in English language, no doubt. Within few days from their employment the rich vocabulary vanished and phrases were far from being articulated.

Same firm used to distribute specialized legal work and coordination of important assignments, such as project finance, energy transactions, clean development mechanism, banking transactions, etc. to new recruits or employee with glit CVs, in defiance of general opinion or annual survey. At deadline a senior had to cope with the bad work and redo drafts and documentation in a proper manner. Within one year the firm lost 4 seniors, each with expertise on a specific area.

Moreover, the firm offered trainings and seminars not based on merits and results, but on a strange principle of let’s avoid discussions why him instead of me?. Costly but silenced, honestly justifying with facts and results on “why him?” was considered rather punitive, you cannot say to someone that he is not working properly and still has a long way in learning. Better be good! Being good doesn’t mean that we are stupid and we cannot assess someone’s work and professional capabilities.

Other law firm “sold” me its recruitment policies as fair and fresh, not subject to any interventions, discriminatory assessment and bla, bla, bla, so why not apply on their marketing department. False, the marketing vacancy was only for people prepared in legal marketing. My guess was they would hire someone from a London based law firm, as in Romania we learned on the way about this marketing and copied international models. They hired someone, not from London, and within few months the administrative department supported with elaboration and preparation of CVs, pitches and offers the well prepared marketing department. I wrongly understood it was not about delivering marketing content, it was about marketing noise, internal and external outsourcing. Also, the fair recruitment policy was subject to siblings’ relationships, clients’ due interests and closed chart system. So no matter what you were doing you had to stick with your nominated position, as it was not about content, it was about the wrap. They even wrapped a former senior partner with whom they supposedly merged and then catalyzed into a takeover that quickly burned, into a senior associate for more than a year. Again, it was not about the achievment content, it was about the precondition of achievement.

Two formal partners who set up their own firm are practicing differentiated human resources approach: recruitment upon interpersonal relationships, work and networking upon their mood, work reimbursed in money but despised in words, disproportionate job intake, fluctuating outcome valuation, preferential tackling and so on. So, why you would want to work for them? for friendship, interpersonal skills, prior work, payback, professional environment and feedback, and last but not least for money. Yes, for money, only if worth. In this case there is no need of CV, it’s about the mood.

All of us have been tempted to put fictitious qualifications or other partial false information in our CV. I sinned too. Even though I did not work hard for some of my cv’s credentials, I dared to insert them as my best products. As I lost confidence in my work potential my CV became a rude boast about myself, an arrogant listing of factotum and makeup achievements of more than 4 pages: too much!!!. The truth is that those achievements were part of a wider team effort. Another truth is that I designed untrue and glamorous make-up Cvs for many of my formal colleagues. Some of them are fortunate to survive based on that penmade armoury. I wonder for how long? Now, my CV has no more than two layout pages because I learned that: “there is a significant difference between arrogance and confidence”.