By Choi Sung-jin
More than half of job seekers have lied during interviews, especially about their pay, a survey shows.
Job Korea surveyed 1,553 people who had job interviews during the first half of this year about their lying experiences, and released the results on Tuesday.
According to the job portal site, 847 respondents, or 54.5 percent of the total, said they had lied during interviews.
Most frequent of such lie (34.5 percent) was “Salary is not important to me as long as I can enjoy my work.” Also common were “I have such a good impression of this company that I must join it by all means” (14.8 percent), “I have great patience that I seldom quit a company once I join it” (13.3 percent), and “I have targeted only this company that I will retry if I fail this time” (10.5 percent).
Other lies include “I am determined to watch and learn diligently” (9.4 percent), “I have the experience to do the job” (8.6 percent), and “I was so nervous that I showed less than 10 percent of what I had prepared” (7.1 percent).
As the cruelest experiences during interviews, the largest share (21.8 percent) recalled giving silly answers failing to notice the intent of the interviewers.
The job seekers also felt bad when they did not like the atmosphere of the company or the attitudes of interviewers (19.3 percent), when they were not even given proper questions but played second fiddle to other job seekers (19 percent), and when they were so nervous that they kept making mistakes (19 percent).