Adding a few white lies to your CV may seem like an easy and untraceable act to get away with, however, recruiters are becoming more and more switched on to these sorts of incidents by the day.

A report from CareerBuilder has found that 75% of hiring managers have caught candidates out on their CV lies, a 20% increase from last year.

Chief Human Resources Officer at CareerBuilder, Rosemary Haefner, explained to Moneyish: “The most common lies centre around exaggerated dates of employment, falsifying degrees or credentials, inflating salary and concealing a criminal record”.

With candidates increasingly lying on their C, Moneyish spoke to a various number of recruiters aiming to uncover the weirdest and strangest lies they’ve come across.

This is what they found:

• A candidate who claimed to have worked for Microsoft, but didn’t know who Bill Gates was.
• A would-be academic jobseeker said he worked under Friedrich Nietzsche – the famous German Philosopher who died 117 years ago.
• A candidate said they had been in an anti-terrorist faction of the CIA, but the dates given would have placed them at primary school age.
• An applicant who took credit for writing a piece of code that the recruiter conducting the interview had actually written.

Moral of the story? Don’t lie on your CV.