How to Spot Exaggeration on a CV

The moment you should be suspicious

You're reading a CV and one line jumps out. "Led a team of 12 to deliver a company-wide system migration." It sounds great. Then you notice the job title next to it is "Junior Analyst" and the company is a 20-person firm. Something doesn't add up, but you can't say exactly what.

That gap — between the language and the actual role — is usually where exaggeration lives. It's rarely an outright lie. It's more often a stretch: the intern who "managed" a project because they were the one who remembered the deadlines, the analyst who "built" a dashboard someone else designed and they populated.

You don't need to become a forensic investigator. You need a habit of noticing a handful of patterns and a short list of questions that make the truth surface on its own.

The patterns worth checking

Titles that outrank the company. A "Head of Marketing" at a five-person startup might genuinely have run the whole function — or might have been the only marketing person, full stop, with no budget and no reports. Neither is a lie. But if the CV implies a scope the headcount can't support, ask about it directly.

Verbs without objects. "Spearheaded," "drove," "championed," "owned" — these words describe a stance, not an action. Compare "drove customer retention initiatives" with "rebuilt the onboarding email sequence, which cut 30-day churn." The second sentence tells you what actually happened. The first could mean almost anything, including sitting in meetings about it.

Skills listed without depth. A CV that lists Python, SQL, Excel, Power BI, Tableau, R and Looker for a two-year role is either describing someone genuinely exceptional or someone who added every tool they've ever clicked on. The way to tell the difference isn't on the page — it's in a follow-up question, which we'll get to.

Dates that don't quite line up. Overlapping employment dates, a role that's suspiciously exactly "2021–2023" with no months, a gap folded into an adjacent job's dates to hide it. Most gaps are innocent — a parent returning to work, a health issue, a business that didn't work out. The dishonesty, when it exists, is usually in hiding the gap rather than the gap itself.

Numbers that are too round or too perfect. "Increased sales by 50%" with no baseline, no timeframe, no context is a claim, not a fact. Real results usually come with a slightly awkward number attached — 34%, or "from 12 to 19 clients" — because real data is rarely tidy.

Responsibility inflation on group work. "Delivered a national rebrand" from someone who was one of eleven people on that project isn't false. It's just missing the word "contributed to." This is the most common form of exaggeration and the hardest to catch from the CV alone, because it's technically true.

Questions that separate real experience from padding

You don't confront someone with "I think you're exaggerating." You just ask the kind of question that only someone who actually did the work can answer easily.

• "Walk me through what you personally did on that project, day to day." People who did the work slow down here and get specific. People who were adjacent to it start speaking in generalities again.
• "What would you have done differently if you'd had the final say?" This only makes sense to someone who understood the constraints, which means they were close to the decision-making, not just the delivery.
• "Who else was on that team, and what did they own?" A genuine contributor can usually place themselves within the team without hesitation. Someone padding their role often struggles to describe what anyone else did, because they weren't paying attention to the parts that weren't theirs.
• "What was the actual number before and after?" If the CV claims a 50% increase, ask for the raw figures. Most people who achieved something real still remember the numbers, even loosely. Most people who inflated a stat go quiet or start rounding further.
• For a listed tool or skill: "What's a problem you hit with [tool] that a beginner wouldn't know to expect?" This filters out "I used it once" from "I actually work in this."

None of these questions are aggressive. They just require the candidate to go one level deeper than the CV did, and depth is the one thing that's hard to fake convincingly for more than a minute or two.

When it's not lying, it's just bad writing

Worth saying clearly: a lot of what looks like exaggeration is actually a candidate who was told, correctly, that CVs need strong action verbs and quantified results — and who then applied that advice without much material to back it up. Someone early in their career, or someone whose native language isn't the one the CV is written in, often reaches for the same three or four impressive-sounding verbs because that's what every CV template tells them to use. That's a writing habit, not a character flaw. The follow-up questions above will tell you which one you're dealing with, because a nervous overstater usually relaxes once you ask a real question, while someone who invented the achievement tends to get more evasive.

What to do once you've caught something

If a candidate's answer doesn't match their CV, you have three reasonable options, roughly in order of how serious the gap is: ask a direct clarifying question in the moment ("the CV says you led this — can you tell me more about what leading it involved?"), note the discrepancy and weight it against everything else you've learned about them, or, if it's a flat contradiction on something material — a qualification, a dismissal they didn't mention, a title that's simply false — treat it as a red flag serious enough to end the process. Small inflation is common enough that it shouldn't sink an otherwise strong candidate on its own. An outright fabrication about something checkable is a different category entirely.

The CV's actual role in your decision

Here's the uncomfortable truth: even a CV with zero exaggeration is still just a claim written by the person it's about. That's not a reason to stop reading CVs — it's a reason not to let the CV carry more weight in your decision than it deserves. This is one of the reasons AssessFit caps a candidate's CV contribution at 30% of their overall score: the CV gets you to the interview, not through it. What a candidate can actually do — on a work sample, in a structured conversation, under a bit of real pressure — tells you far more than any bullet point, embellished or not.

The goal isn't to catch every stretch of the truth. It's to stop treating the CV as evidence when it's really just an opening argument.