Gruntled Employees

Liar, liar, your résumé's on fire

The Boston Globe's terrific workplace reporter Diane E. Lewis noted in today's paper a recent survey called "Résumé Lies." CareerBuilder.com polled 2,200 employees and over 1,000 hiring managers on the subject of fibbing on your c.v. Fifty-seven percent of the hiring managers reported that they've caught lies on applicants' résumés. Of those lie detectors (my lame-but-unavoidable pun, not Diane's), 93% chose not to hire the liar (also my lame rhyme — sorry).

Ironically, only five percent of the workers polled admitted to writing résumé fiction. So either all this lying is being done by a select few ... or people who lie on their résumés tend to lie on surveys, too.

Ten mistakes employers make when using noncompetes

1. Making every employee — from the CEO to the mailroom guy — sign a noncompete.
2. Giving an existing employee a new noncompete without giving him or her something else in exchange for it.
3. Using a noncompete to protect anything other than trade secrets, confidential business information, and customer goodwill.
4. Misunderstanding what the heck "goodwill" is. (Hint: it's not your brand image; it's the customer relationships your employee is paid to maintain.)
5. Trying to use a noncompete in California.
6. Using noncompete enforcement as a strategy to scare employees out of leaving your company.
7. Failing to update a noncompete when the employee's job substantially changes.
8. Hoping that a court will scale back (but otherwise enforce) your overbroad noncompete.
9. Waiting too long to go to court to enforce a breached noncompete.
10. Trying to use a noncompete to protect against ordinary competition (as opposed to unfair competition).