How to spot real skills vs. inflated experience in job applications

The CVs in today's job markets are as good as a mirage. Why? 

Often, the skills and work experience stated in a candidate's CV are over-exaggerated; they just don’t exist in reality. And this makes recruiting even harder!

If you want to spot and differentiate between real and exaggerated skills in your job applicants, look for specific features, such as how their achievements are framed, progression of responsibilities over the years, confidence in their writing style, reliance on tools to get the job done, etc.

If you want to make your judgment sharp using such tricks, keep reading!

How to spot real candidate skills in job applications?

1. Look for specificity

Candidates who have genuinely worked focus on describing what they handled. Instead of presenting a long list of achievements, they discuss details such as constraints, trade-offs, and outcomes that required decision-making. This indicates the use of real skills and efforts. 

You must look out for contextless, broad phrases, such as “responsible for end-to-end delivery” or “worked closely with cross-functional teams”. Such phrases that provide no context or claims are commonly used by inflated profiles.

Apart from using these resume skills, you must also run the applicant's CV through an AI detector(opens in a new tab). This ensures that the job application was genuine and not aided by AI.

2. Pay attention to how achievements are framed

Candidates with real skill tend to describe how results came to be, including missteps and iterations. They understand cause and effect because they lived through it.

Assess the depth of their skills by questioning their achievements. Real candidates can easily answer what made their project work or fail, or what they would change in it next time, whereas inflated profiles often lack this clarity. 

Red flag candidates often skip straight to the results, assuming that you won’t ask how they were achieved. You need to be alert about such applicants and cross-verify their achievements. 

3. Examine progression

Focus on how the candidate progressed in terms of responsibilities and task complexity in their previous roles, rather than solely on their job title. 

Make sure you ask these two questions before making any decision, as they would help you identify their real skills: 

• Did the candidate take on larger problems over time? 
• Did their scope evolve in a way that suggests trust was earned?

If a resume shows good candidate progress, you can conduct job trials to assess whether they would be beneficial to your organization. 

4. Notice how candidates talk about collaboration

Unlike candidates with real experience, those with inflated profiles often treat their collaborative projects as a checkbox and provide no explanation for them. 

You must assess whether the candidate can articulate their role within a team dynamic. Did they influence decisions, resolve conflicts, or adapt their approach? Or do they remain abstract, describing teamwork without context?

Real collaborators understand that working with others is rarely smooth. Their descriptions reflect that realism. Inflated claims tend to romanticise teamwork while avoiding its complexity.

5. Watch for tool familiarity vs. tool dependence

Inflated experience leans heavily on naming software, frameworks, or platforms without explaining how they were used. 

Strong candidates with real skills describe why they chose a particular tool, how they adapted it to constraints, or what they learned when it failed. They understand principles beneath the tools. 

When reviewing applications that mention using specific tools, you must ask whether the candidate could perform their tasks without those preferred tools. If they are unable to, it might indicate a lack of good work experience. 

6. Assess language confidence without overconfidence

Candidates with real skill tend to write with measured confidence. They know what they are good at and where they are still growing, which is a good display of maturity and self-awareness. 

Applications where the language reflects judgment and awareness of self-limits are the ones that you must aim for. Such applications are not weak, but credible. 

7. Test claims through conversation

For eg, during an interview, you can simply ask your candidates to walk you through their previous projects rather than dissecting each one specifically. 

Real skills become more evident during such conversations, where candidates have to explain how they think. By asking follow-up questions that prompt self-reflection, such as “What would you do differently?” or “What surprised you the most in this project?”, you can look for candidates who answer more precisely. 

Candidates who answer such follow-up questions efficiently possess real skills and experience, unlike inflated applicants who would struggle to move beyond rehearsed answers. 

8. Value learning patterns over perfect narratives

It is important that you look for learning patterns while assessing your candidates. Value their career transitions, roles, and career trajectories instead of looking for the perfect career journey. 

Candidates who can articulate learning across varied work experiences are usually the ones with a real set of experience and skills. They can easily adapt to new challenges and are self-aware about their shortcomings. 

9. Look for evidence of judgment

Genuine candidates show up with experiences in which they had to decide between imperfect options. It's because of their real-life responsibilities that they can talk about trade-offs, prioritisation, and consequences so naturally.

You can observe this judgment while reviewing applications, where a candidate's expression shows awareness of why certain decisions were made. You can use the following questions to get a point of reference for the same:

• Does the candidate understand the impact beyond their immediate task? 
• Do they acknowledge second-order effects, risks, or constraints? 

Summary 

• Look for specific, concrete details rather than long lists of achievements and skills.
• Pay attention to how achievements are framed and explained.
• Examine candidate growth based on the responsibilities they took on, rather than job titles.
• Notice how candidates discuss team collaboration. 
• Identify whether candidates are familiar with tools or dependent on them.
• Differentiate between confident and over-confident candidates. 
• Converse with the candidates rather than asking questions that can elicit rehearsed answers. 
• Observe the learning pattern of candidates in their work history. 
• Look for evidence of judgment in candidates to ensure that they can critically analyze situations and make relevant decisions.