Remember that time you lied on your CV? Well, you might want to rethink now.
Courts are cracking down on CV fraudsters, forcing people to pay back their wages.
We’ve all done it. Even I’ve ‘embellished’ a little in the past when it comes to fleshing out a CV (or résumé to you folks across the pond) - making things seem slightly more grand than they actually are.
You’ve done it too. Yes, you there. I know your game…
A survey by recruitment site Reed indicated that as many as up to 40% of UK workers lie, or have lied on their CVs. Yikes.
There are clearly also going to be countless people out there who have ‘The Apprentice’-worthy CVs, littered with outlandish qualifications and experience, ready to be savagely ripped apart by the ‘Claude’s’ of this world.
You know the type - like where you didn’t actually get trained in martial arts by Chuck Norris himself, helping you perfect your roundhouse kick.
Or how you were mentored by Richard Branson on Sundays after he’d had his morning egg and soldiers.
Or were single-handedly the one person that was solely qualified and responsible for bringing Google to the UK.
You know, crazy, batshit mental absurdity that is so obviously transparent, even the Emperor in his brand spanking new clothes are chortling at them.
But the time has come to maybe rethink this sort of ‘strategy’, because the courts are starting to clamp down on it - and are actually making people pay back wages.
In an article from People Management recently, they introduced the instance where a former NHS chief executive had been found guilty of falsifying qualifications and experience to his former employer - namely, he lied about his PhD and previous career to further his roles within the organisation, as well as other directorships. (He was also jailed, in fact).
After a Supreme Court hearing, they cited the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, and thusly ordered that part of his salary must be repaid. Being a top role, that was significant compared to us mere mortals! He was ordered to pay back £97,000 out of the £643,000 he’d earned during his employment.
Ouch.
Justice well and truly served.
So whilst this is, granted, a bit of a rare and special case, given the amounts at stake, legal experts have said that this decision, now that a precedent has clearly been set; it should be a warning to candidates, employers and recruiters, in ensuring that CVs are accurate, and not misleading. (Let alone downright fabricated).
Honesty, integrity and more rigorous checking of CVs is the order of the day, especially when it comes to more executive and senior high pay-packet roles, said another legal expert. While this sort of instance wouldn’t be overly likely in typical workplace hiring environments, this ruling has been a bit of a warning shot, to ensure everything is completely above board, and to be mindful of potential cases of fraud.
Word to the wise, eh?
Stuff I Found That You Might Like
A while back, Sky announced Sky Glass - a method of receiving Sky TV without an unsightly satellite dish adorning your house, all built in to their own brand of TV, in various sizes. So all the Sky channels and on-demand content streams directly through your home broadband.
Launching in mid October, they’ve now taken things further - by announcing Sky Stream. Taking design cues (quite plainly) from the Apple TV set top box, you’ll now be able to get Sky TV without the need to change your TV set itself, all powered by a little puck sized box which again, will stream your telly service directly through your home broadband.
A mild kick in the teeth for those who ended up buying Sky Glass, with many having to change their TV set where they perhaps mightn’t have ordinarily done so otherwise. Having a dish-less plug in box is by far a more elegant solution, in my book, and still gives you the freedom to choose the TV set of your own preference; rather than trusting Sky’s claims of it being the best, i.e. ‘pixel perfect, with quantum dot technology - a billion colours better!’ and any other ridiculously jargon’d marketing nonsense they labelled it with at the time.
Being such a small box, it looks unlikely that it’ll contain a hard drive or SSD, to ‘record’ programmes in the standard way like with Sky Q, as they mention on the website -
“Clever features like Restart live TV and Playlist make your TV smarter”
So my guess would be you’ll create a playlist of stuff you want to watch/subscribe to in that sense, then when new episodes are available it’ll ping it to the top the list for viewing. Or something.
Probably.
At least finally, Sky have caught up to what technology can provide in this day and age, and thankfully it’ll see the gradual demise of ugly satellite dishes on houses in due course.
AI Generated Art
As it’s seemingly impossible to escape from these days online, you’ll undoubtedly be familiar with the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated art. Using machine-learning technology, it’s now possible for AI websites/tools to create pieces of ‘art’ purely from an input of text description.
Weird, I know.
There’s a website that’s gone viral in recent months which has a tool called Dall-E 2, (named after Salvador Dali, who I’m sure if he were alive today, would be horrified) which does just this. And a few days ago, it’s opened itself up for anyone to try it.
Thus far, I’ve not played with their version of it, because I stumbled upon the fact that also a few days ago, Canva launched their own version of this technology, baked in to the platform! It’s available for both pro and free user accounts.
Being a Canva evangelist (as you’ll have spotted from a previous article) - you just know I had to give it a go.
So, make of these what you will! The overlaid text on the below images are the input instructions I gave it to process, and the artwork is what it ended up churning out.
The results range from the quirky, to cool, to the downright bloody frightening.
Who knows what the future of AI-generated art will hold - its purpose, its abilities, let alone its implications. But for now, all I know is that I’m positively terrified.
Don’t have nightmares, kids….
In Other News
British supermarket Tesco has jumped on the TikTok bandwagon to announce a new competition to become the new ‘voice of the checkout’ for their self-checkout tills.
I’ll be honest, now that I’m only just over a month away from turning 40, TikTok is not something I’ve ever downloaded, let alone used. It’s one of those platforms that’s passed me by, and I firmly leave it in the hands of ‘the youth’, now that it’s pretty clear that I don’t come under the banner of ‘youth’ anymore, sadly. Christ, that’s depressing.
However, brands are on TikTok a-plenty, mainly because they have to be in this ever-changing world of ‘soshulls’… I’ll leave it to them, I’m not the sort to start using it now at this stage in life, dancing away in my living room to Ariana Grande or whatever the kids are listening to these days.
Back in my day, Ariana Grande was merely a font.
Anyhoo, where was I? Oh yes, Tesco. Well, this one has irritated me somewhat, as my main day job has, since 2008, been as a professional voice over artist. For the uninitiated, essentially, I lend my voice to various businesses to promote stuff, or educate, inform or train people in various things. I don’t usually blow my own trumpet, but I consider myself pretty good at it.
So when this news broke, initially it was intriguing - after all, I’ve been the voice of a series of kids toys for JCB in the past, so why not be in the running to annoy people by announcing that there’s an unexpected item in the bagging area when checking out their Finest quinoa?
Then I saw the small print.
Lo and behold, of course they’re not offering this up as a job, requiring a professional to do it properly. They’ve launched it as a competition for any old Tom, Dick or Harry to submit an audition.
The ‘fee’, if you are selected?
(And I say ‘fee’ as loosely as I possibly can.)
10,000 Clubcard points.
You couldn’t make it up.
Oh well, simply yet another company that doesn’t seemingly care if it’s going to sound professional or not.
What do you reckon?
The one thing that did make me smile though was Aldi’s efforts [«Link to their TikTok video; apologies, it wouldn’t let me embed it]. Aldi’s social media team are internet-famous for their highly amusing Twitter feed, and they couldn’t resist chiming in with their own take. All whilst making a sly dig that they weren’t bothered about the Clubcard points, because their pricing being so low as standard means Clubcards aren’t remotely necessary!
Oof. Jab, twist and parry. Well done Aldi, I salute you!