Just in case you needed reminding that having some harmless "little inaccuracies" on your résumé can backfire spectacularly, remember the name "Patrick Imbardelli".
Patrick Imbardelli walked out on his £300,000 a year job as head of the [InterContinental Hotels] group's Asia Pacific chain only days before he was poised to join the main board of the FTSE 100 company.
As The Independent – and just about every other news outlet on the planet – reports, Mr Imbardelli, whose reputation garnished over 25 years in the hotel industry is now in tatters, had falsely claimed to have three qualifications - a bachelor of business degree from the University of Victoria in Australia, and a BSc and a masters of business administration, both from Cornell University in the United States.
But just as it was announced that he was about to join the main board, a whistleblower alerted InterContinental to look into his background.
One expert in the headhunting business described a fake qualification as "like a ticking timebomb waiting to go off - it can take years to go off but when it does everything is destroyed".
As Derek Torres noted here only this week, the same fate could presumably befall a huge number of others out there – according to a poll by Monster.com, some two-thirds of the British workforce, for example, has lied about job qualifications on their CVs. Time , perhaps, to double-check what you said about that Harvard MBA . . .
