?Please don?t misconstrue my past seventeen jobs as ?job-hopping?. I have never quit a job.?

Well, it is unlikely that you would find such naivety and candor in corporate resumes. More likely, there would be a fair amount of embellishment to showcase career achievements in the best possible light. And nobody does this more ingeniously than students in B-schools. Recently, as the IIMs had their summer placements, I thought of going for a quick jog along the memory lane.

I remember my experience being on either side of the interview table?both as a student and as an interviewer. After a couple of years into my job as an investment banker at JPMorgan Hong Kong, I was asked by the HR folks to scrutinise and short-list some applicants from my alma mater, IIM Ahmedabad. They normally seek the expertise of an alumnus because to them all resumes from IIMs look the same. Invariably, a large proportion of the resumes contain descriptions like topper, ranker, this scholarship getter, that competition winner, etc. The HR guys overseas do not have a good sense of the education environment in India, or at least they did not have it a few years back. So they would have no clue if a city top ranker from Khudra Patti is the same as a fifth ranker from a top-notch school in Delhi. Similarly, they do not have the faintest of idea of, say, what an NTSE scholarship would mean; or if it is better than a state-level scholarship.

Top-notch B-schools in India are so swamped by students from top universities in India that shortlisting often becomes a process of exclusion rather than inclusion. A common process to eliminate is to try to look for clues on excessive massaging the candidate has done to the resume. Invariably, all students massage their resumes?some more, some less. For instance, nobody would state that he was sitting on the bench of a software company for 10 out of the 12 months he worked there as a graduate trainee, even if that?s what he actually did. Likewise, although his work may have had nothing to do with finance, a candidate would state that he had worked on some financial package that the company was building. Curiously, most of the resumes of engineers with work experience in Infosys avow that they had something to do with Finacle-Infosys? award winning product for Bank Treasury. Now, it doesn?t take a Heisenberg to figure out that you certainly cannot take all that is stated in the resume at face value. I have done it as a student. I have made mention of projects that I did, seem a lot more impactful than it was anywhere close to, or made some remote publication in electrical engineering seem noteworthy.

However, cooking up non-existent awards, or trying too hard to sell oneself is objectionable even if it doesn?t get detected. Currently, if such ingenuity does get caught, the punishment is hardly anything that would make it a deterrent. At best, it entails some social stigma. For instance, a couple of years back, an undergrad student at Yale University, Aleksey Vayner, claimed to have run a hedge fund ?Vayner Capital Management?. He submitted a resume to a couple of investment banks that included a line about his Web site. That Web site turned out to feature a pretty self-aggrandising video of himself. He also claimed to have written a book, Women?s Silent Tears: A Unique Gendered Perspective on the Holocaust. His resume soon became the talk of the town, or rather the street. The name?which sounds like ?Vainer??was just too perfect!

Sure, everybody wants to impress and get hired, but there is a thin line between trying to make an impression and stretching facts too far. I am told that the placement offices at B-schools these days have some kind of a regulation to make sure that students do not overstretch their credentials. I think it is a good practice. Also, HR associations, placement consultants, job sites like naukri.com and B-schools could come together to make people, especially students who are starting their careers, aware that such practices are unacceptable. It would eventually benefit all concerned, and more importantly, provide the right guidance to students who are starting their corporate trek.

In a competitive environment like that of B-schools where all students have pretty high-grade credentials, there is a tendency to gain every possible inch. The perspective is somewhere lost that a summer internship does not define a career. However, one can?t totally blame the young students because at that age, you don?t have the benefit of hindsight. Here, past students through alumni associations can be very effective in communicating to students that a bad summer placement or even a not-so-great campus job doesn?t mean the end of the world. A career is more akin to a marathon than a 100-metre race. Not being truthful may make one a fleeting champion, but it could also end the Ben Johnson way.

?The author, formerly with JP MorganChase?s Global Capital Markets, Singapore, is currently CEO, Quantum Phinance