Ethics are defined as “The rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group or culture.” The workplace certainly represents a particular group or culture, and each company has its own set of rules and values that comprise its ethical approach. Each employee is also expected to align with these ethics, and behave in a way that reflects company guidelines. In the modern workplace, with Culture becoming increasingly important, workers and bosses are both scrambling to hone their soft skills to adapt to the times – but for most ethical issues, things remain constant.
Ethics, unlike personal morality, tend to be normalized for everyone participating in mainstream society. Stealing is frowned upon no matter who you are, no matter where you are. But do people have a different set of ethics for work than they do for their lives outside work? Is telling a white lie to your spouse the same kind of “bad” as lying or exaggerating during an interview or on a resume? And what moral/ethical qualities are employers looking for most of all?
Respondents were asked:
- Have you ever lied or exaggerated on a resume or interview question?
- How often do you lie to your boss?
- Which of your soft skills would you most like to improve?
- Which of the following qualities is most important when hiring someone new for your company?
The results:
Men admit to lying to get a job more often than women
- Male respondents were 6% more likely to say they had lied or exaggerated on a resume or in an interview in their lives than females. The elusive, important element that’s not visible from these averages is just how many people there are who would admit to lying or exaggerating in the past if they had. Even when queried anonymously, many will instinctively lie even to themselves about such a transgression. Others will tell themselves that gaming the system – rigged or not – is necessary to survive when others have an advantage. The desperation of certain job seekers would support this notion. However, if we take respondents at their word, these averages tell us people see lying or exaggerating to get a job as a serious transgression and avoid it at all costs.
- Asian/Pacific Islanders and African-American respondents both admitted to lying or exaggerating on a resume or during a job interview at a higher average than the average for all workers. Hispanic/Latino respondents responded yes with about the same frequency as the overall male employee average. Overall numbers of employees of that ethnicity may answer for those differences. The Caucasian responses were closer to the average of overall female responses than to overall male responses.
- Employees in HR answered yes to the question about lying on a resume or during an interview almost 10% more often than workers from any other department. This may have to do with the sensitivity of information one deals with in HR, not to mention the sheer amount of resumes that cross those employees’ desks. Honesty about this issue may be more of a sticking point for those who work in hiring. On the opposite side of the scale, only 9% of C-Suite employees say they ever lied or exaggerated on a resume or in an interview.
- When department responses are broken down by gender, we often see a huge disparity between gender responses. In Admin, women were nearly twice as likely to admit they had lied or exaggerated for a resume or an interview. In Business Development, the opposite is true, and in those departments men are actually more than twice as likely to admit to lying or exaggerating. Same story for Communications. Men in Design and Engineering are apparently three times more likely to have lied or exaggerated for an interview or resume, or to admit to having done so. In the Legal department, where lying and exaggeration and admission of doing so can surely carry great weight, not a single woman said they had lied or exaggerated for an interview or resume, but fully 29% of men say they have.
- When viewed by years of job experience, we see that “yes” responses about lying or exaggerating on a resume or for an interview are highest for those who have worked for 1 to 3 years, but lowest for those who had worked 3 to 6 years – the very next age bracket. Whether this implies that our sense of honesty wavers throughout our lives is hard to tell from this data, but we can at least infer that a sense of honesty is not something that grows or declines necessarily from youth to middle age.
- For most age groups, responses stay close to overall averages, implying that the issue of lying or exaggerating to get a job – as well as the issue of admitting one had done so – are constants that don’t transform much with experience. The only relative spike we see is from the 51-55 age group, implying either more of an impulse to be honest about past transgressions OR a sense that the older one gets, the harder it is to find a job and therefore the more tempting the idea of lying or exaggerating on a resume or in an interview becomes.
- When responses are divided by metro, we see more disparities. Almost a third of workers in Houston and Phoenix admit to having lied or exaggerated to get a job. Only one-tenth of Denver employees say the same. (Is Rocky Mountain air more conducive to honesty than dry heat?)
30% say they’ve lied to their boss
- Almost a third of employees say they’ve lied to their boss at least once. More specific answers “once a month,” “once a quarter,” and “once ever” were all chosen at relatively the same frequency, with at or around one-tenth of respondents choosing each option.
- Responses were very similar for both men and women, with men slightly more prone to say they had lied to their boss.
- By ethnicity, we see that no group said “never” more often than the Caucasian respondents. Hispanic/Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, and African-American respondents all answered “never” about 10% less frequently than the Caucasians.
- By age, the “never” responses increase with each bracket. The 18-25 age group responded never at just over 50%.By the 46-50 group, that number has risen to more than three quarters.
- A very similar trend is seen when responses are broken up by experience levels. Forty-two percent of entry level workers say they’ve lied to their boss at least once. For the Over 10 years segment, that number drops to 22%. Younger workers may be thinking of more menial jobs where lying or exaggerating, while not acceptable, was more to be expected. More experienced workers may have forgiven themselves for decades-old offenses.
One-third of employees want to improve their work communication
- Nearly one-third of all respondents chose Communication when asked which soft skill they most wanted to improve at work. Emotional Intelligence was the 2ndmost popular response, and we’ll see that value also popping up frequently in this section.
- Men and women chose Communication as the soft skill they would most like to improve at almost exactly the same rate. Female respondents were more concerned about improving their problem solving capabilities, and men were slightly more interested in upping their emotional intelligence.
- Every ethnicity said Communication is the soft skill they most want to improve. Emotional Intelligence was a runner-up for all groups, and was ranked particularly high by Asian/Pacific Islander and African-American respondents. The outlier here is the “other” grouping, which collects scores from respondents who did not identify as one of the other ethnicity options. For that group, Emotional Intelligence slimly nudged out Communication from the top spot.
- Most work departments chose Communication as their No. 1 choice as well. Notably, employees from the Executive branch chose Emotional Intelligence most often. The execs went with Adaptability as their runner-up, with Communication coming in third. Modern workplaces are more and more focused on internal culture, and execs may be choosing Emotional Intelligence more because they see it as an important factor of the new way we are working.
- After their mid-forties, workers consistently chose Emotional Intelligence more frequently than Communication. Prior to that age group, all age group segments chose Communication as the soft skill they most wanted to work on.
- Broken up by experience level, all respondents chose Communication except for those who had worked Over 10 Years. For that group, Emotional Intelligence nudged out Communication for their top choice. This may also have to do with recent changes in the workplace to focus more on culture.
A third say a b work ethic is the most important quality in a new hire
- Overall, a solid work ethic is the most popular response. A sense that the potential new hire will be a good culture fit is a b second, followed by a new hire’s integrity and then their resourcefulness. The potential new hire’s prior experience was, perhaps surprisingly, the least popular response to the question.
- Women and men see eye-to-eye on this. Both chose work ethic most frequently, but women were 6% more likely to choose that option than men. Men were slightly more likely to choose integrity, resourcefulness, and a sense of culture fit than women, but to a negligible degree in each case.
- When respondents were segmented into their various ethnicities, we see that African-Americans are more interested in a potential new hire’s work ethic (39%) than we saw with averages for all employees (regardless of ethnicity) or averages for women and men overall. For African-Americans, Integrity was the second-most desirable quality in a new hire. Caucasians and Asian/Pacific Islanders both chose Good Culture Fit nearly as often as they chose Work Ethic.
- All age brackets chose work ethic as their No. 1 choice. The importance of being a good cultural fit rises with each age bracket.
- Being a good culture fit becomes more important the longer you’ve held a job. Entry level employees easily chose Work Ethic as the No. 1 choice. Employees who had worked 10 years or longer still chose Work Ethic, but it only beat Good Culture Fit for that group by one percentage point.
Methodology
- Questions were in Yes/No and multiple-choice format. A total of four survey questions were included with 23,299 responses. Each question was initiated between April 2018 and April 2019. Results are as of April 30, 2019.
- Have you ever lied or exaggerated on a resume or interview question?
- How often do you lie to your boss?
- Which of your soft skills would you most like to improve?
- Which of the following is most important when hiring someone new for your company?
- People of all ages, educational backgrounds, ethnicities and experience levels were included.
- Employees hail from small, mid-size, and large companies (VC-funded, privately-held, and public) to household brands like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber, etc.
About Comparably
Comparably is an online career destination for compensation and workplace culture data with a mission to make work dramatically more transparent and rewarding. Employees can anonymously and publically rate their company culture and access salary data through the lens of specific demographics, including gender, ethnicity, age, location, years of experience, company size, title/department, and education. With the most comprehensive and structured data in the industry, it has accumulated 10 million ratings and hundreds of thousands of salary records by employees at 50,000 U.S. companies, from startups to Fortune 50 businesses. The company’s data-driven approach has quickly made it a trusted media resource for salary and workplace culture, and one of the fastest-growing SaaS solutions for employer branding. For more information, go to Comparably.com. For workplace culture and salary studies, including Comparably’s annual Best Places to Work and Best CEOs awards, go to Comparably.com/blog.
