Imagine hiring the ideal candidate on paper, only to realize they lack the tactical skills to actually do the work. This trend of misrepresentation, or skillfishing, presents a growing challenge for organizations. Candidates overstate their capabilities during the hiring process, and they show up to their new roles carrying significant skill gaps.
The consequences of this deception hit businesses hard. Skillfishing drains daily productivity, frustrates current team members, and can drive up operational costs. While separation remains the best choice in some cases, many leaders face a difficult central question: What can organizations do when skillfishing is not a dealbreaker?
Rather than absorbing the costs of turnover and starting the recruitment process over, organizations can look inward for a solution. Learning and development (L&D) provides a way to train up new hires while avoiding the costs of turnover. L&D executives can look to align learning opportunities with in-demand skills, engage managers to support learning, and adjust frameworks for better utilization of learning tools.
What Is Skillfishing?
Skillfishing, or careerfishing, happens when candidates misrepresent their skills during the hiring process. In fact, 93% of recent job seekers surveyed by GCheck, a compliance and background check firm, admit to embellishingor misrepresenting themselves during the application process. This is more than simply padding a resume by rounding up project success metrics. It’s exaggerating expertise (61%), inflating the scope of past roles (59%), making up stories in interviews (47%), and adjusting employment dates to hide gaps (45%).
This trend is not new by any means, but several factors have put pressure on candidates to give into this inflation of skills. Long-term unemployment is up, reaching 25.7 weeks in February, the longest duration since December 2021. The effects of going six months, to one year, to more than a year without employment can put pressure on candidates to misrepresent their skills. “When candidates feel like it’s nearly impossible to stand out in a crowded market, they start doing whatever they can to differentiate themselves, even if that means embellishing their experience,” said Houman Akhavan, founder and chief executive officer at GCheck.
Additionally, the increased availability of artificial intelligence tools can help polish the presentation of candidates during the hiring process while the overwhelming number of credentials available has led to a sort of “inflation” of actual skills possessed.
The consequences of skillfishing for organizations are far-reaching. On an organizational level, a bad hire, particularly where separation is necessary, adds to turnover and recruitment costs. However, there is also a longer-term impact on culture and performance. “When hiring decisions are based on inflated representations, organizations risk building teams that look strong on paper but struggle in execution,” Akhavan said. “That often leads to early attrition, rehiring costs, and broader disruption.” Ultimately, careerfishing isn’t just a hiring mistake. It creates a compounding problem that affects team performance, manager bandwidth, and overall workforce quality over time.
These costs weigh heavily on organizations, and in some instances, it makes more sense to upskill a new hire than begin the recruitment process once again. This path requires L&D to step in and help managers and teams fill the skills gap, and quickly.
The Role of L&D in Addressing Skillfishing
Skillfishing doesn’t stop at hiring. “It becomes an L&D challenge the moment the employee starts,” Akhavan said. To confront the challenge, L&D executives can look to three key concepts to utilize strategies already deployed and build new ones.
Align Learning with Key Skills
Learning and development teams are prone to falling into an operational silo where organizations base programs not on the specific needs of an organization but more general workforce trends. “Adopting AI tools” may have merit within an organization, but without careful calculation of the ways in which specific departments and teams can benefit from specific tools, the idea can fall flat.
Instead of chasing general trends, L&D should look to the overall strategy of an organization, where the path of growth leads, and take that knowledge to conduct an audit of current skills. “For L&D leaders, success isn’t just about building skills after the fact. It’s about working more closely with hiring and HR to ensure expectations, verification and development are aligned from the start,” Akhavan said. This can help when organizations pull in L&D teams to provide a lifeboat for new hires missing key capabilities.
Bring Managers into the Fold for a Strong Learning Culture
Managers are on the front lines when it comes to supporting learning and development within an organization. L&D executives can utilize the presence of managers on teams to encourage engagement. Specifically, L&D can make sure managers have what they need to be super users of the learning management system (LMS). This helps demonstrate to teams some of the practical applications of engaging with the LMS. Additionally, organizations should support and encourage managers to focus on continuous development as part of their performance management of teams. L&D can support these goals by ensuring their LMS is easy to use and accessible by managers and all employees.
Review Training Frameworks to Ease Common Frustrations
The system where learning takes place is important, but there are additional opportunities to ease the burden of learning by addressing common complaints. Some of the top frustrations cited include lack of motivation, forgotten materials, irrelevant content, and outdated information, according to a SHRM and TalentLMS report.
When workers struggle to retain information, consider microlearning to break larger format learning into something more digestible. This can also support new hires with skills gaps as they balance onboarding tasks with learningnew skills.
Walking the Line
Careerfishing doesn’t stop at hiring; it becomes an L&D challenge the moment the employee starts. When employees enter roles without the skills they represented, leaders often expect learning teams to close those gaps quickly. “That’s not always realistic, especially when 39% of candidates report post-hire stress or anxiety after embellishing, which can impact confidence, engagement, and their ability to ramp effectively,” Akhavan said. While it may take time to bring candidates up to speed, L&D can address frustrating skill gaps, allowing teams to flourish.
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