Grossly misrepresenting work experience in a job application does sound a bit like misrepresenting a material fact in order to obtain action by another party, where the other party relies on the misrepresentation and suffers injury from it.
Now I wouldn't want to have bootcamp graduates prosecuted for fraud, and it would be near impossible to put any concrete number on the damage anyways, but I do wonder if bootcamps that systematically abet graduates to commit fraud run afoul of any laws.
Hyperbole on resumes is the sine qua non of the hiring experience. This is no different, just a more systematic form that I'm not used to seeing historically.
Interestingly though, very few of the resumes I describe actually list CodeSmith at all. So I didn't make the connection immediately.
Seemed to work really well specifically with city government jobs (New York), based on the response/application ratio. I'm guessing it may have to do with their antiquated systems.
That's plain old keyword stuffing.
never thought of for resume
These resumes however are all identical to one another. It's a different situation, but that notwithstanding— we still do review all these and your sentiment very much aligns with my own.
IMO, this technique has been exaggerated to the point of being counterproductive.
As soon as the interviewer discovers that some claimed experience on the resume was a lie, they can't trust the rest of the resume. The interviews get harder and the interviewer starts looking deeper for other inconsistencies or outright lies.
Often, discovering outright lies on someone's resume is sufficient to drop them out of the hiring pipeline completely.
Spamming keywords that you don't actually know might get you into flawed companies that don't know how to screen or interview candidates, but those generally aren't good places to work.
The main thing I was talking about is using something like tiny white color text to reiterate stuff from their post. Or literally say I don't have any experience with X, Y, and Z. It's not lying, a printout doesn't show it, but it can trick the system.
One other example might be using the same inflated wording that job postings use (puffery?). Using fancy jazzed up language sometimes helps, especially if it includes keywords that are reasonably true or a matter of opinion (like the job posting saying it's a great opportunity or cutting edge tech).
No mention of the CodeSmith bootcamp, although I had deduced they were probably a bootcamp grad due to their degree in a separate field.
Also fishy is that one of their experiences just lists "stealth startup" as the company name, now I'm wondering if that role existed at all. Thanks for the heads up here.
That said, I'd encourage you to still review the candidate as you would any other. I try to give all folks the benefit of the doubt, even if I don't entirely agree with this particular practice. They may have some bright spots in the code you're actually able to check out. It's a great topic for conversation if you choose to have a call with them as well.
That said, as a bootcamp grad myself, it personally irks me when I see other bootcamp grads try and misrepresent their bootcamp projects as work experience. I know that some bootcamps direct their students to do exactly this, but that doesn't make it okay.
I guess it works though. I feel like I'm always the one pointing out to our recruiting team that certain jobs on a resume are not actually jobs. If someone else is doing the tech screen, they may just make it through.
I love when candidates are up front about things like this, seeing a cover letter thats akin to "Hey, I'm just getting my started in this industry. I graduated <bootcamp-x>, I would love to get some feedback on the work I did on <project-x>."
I have no degrees myself, very much identify with the self-learning journey.
SingleSprout is much bigger today so maybe things could fall through. But it is unlikely that they would be willingly or knowingly shepherding this process. I'll point them to this thread so they're aware of what's going on and can chime in if they'd like.
I'm happy to edit my post to add any needed language to properly represent anyone mentioned.
To be fair, I wouldn't call this a "problem" insofar as it doesn't cause any meaningful pain apart from extra noise in the funnel. Given how poor the signal-to-noise ratio is in most hiring funnels, the impact is more or less de minimis.
I do still review every submission, at least in a cursory way, just in case the candidate has other legitimate experience and/or novel work on the github they link to.
And as such, as I've stated elsewhere in this thread, I still review every one of these in earnest.
A lesser form of fraud, but still insidious at this point, are the templated resumes that misrepresent work experience. They will list a top line item in "work history" of something that sounds like tech startup, but in actuality isn't a company at all. It's just an open source project, that no one actually uses, with a website. Apart from the items listed, the candidates never have any legitimate work experience. It smells like a way to get resumes past any ATS keyword filtering and/or less-experienced recruiters.
And usually, the candidate hasn't really written much code at all in the repo. Just a smattering of readme updates, config changes, and maybe some bug fixes amounting to less than ~100-200 SLOC over the span of months.
In 100% of these cases we've seen so far, the resumes look exactly the same, including formatting/layout/etc. The projects all exist under the "OSLabs Beta" github orb [1] and the resume also lists a tech talk they did under the "SingleSprout Speaker Series" moniker. Most often, there is no actual evidence of them doing this talk, but in many cases you can find someone else doing the same talk topic on youtube if you search.
SingleSprout is a recruiting organization, so it seems at least somewhat likely that they are the ones shepherding this process, though I have no evidence of that. It could just be that they partner with this OS Labs entity as part of their candidate funnel. Whatever the case may be, this is at best (if I'm being charitable) a gross misrepresentation of candidate experience.
N.B. I am 100% OK with hiring folks based on (F)OSS experience. An active github is actually something I select for and, if its available, I will spend significant time reviewing such that I can have a meaningful discussion with the candidate about their work. These candidates are different entirely (for hopefully obvious reasons).
[1] https://github.com/oslabs-beta
EDIT: Wanted to add some clarification here that this post is about the candidates involved, on the topic of hiring woes that OP brought up, but not about the specific entities I mentioned. It may just be incidental that all of the resumes we've seen have had the aforementioned patterns. It is not my intent to malign any of the orgs I referenced.