This reminds me of my last job, where the karma gods smiled upon me and not so much for another guy.
I've always written my resume somewhat uniquely for SEO[1] and happen to work quite heavily in the Linux space. At the time several years ago, my resume was on the first or second page google search results for something along the lines of "linux system administrator" and variations.
The stars must have aligned as some poor schmuck thought he'd spruce up his resume by copy & pasting lines verbatim from the first 4-5 good Linux resumes he found via google. Unfortunately for him, one of them was mine. Also unfortunately for him, I'm known as a very technical interviewer that doesn't take any bs.
So besides the fact he wasn't qualified from a technical perspective for this position, I decided to see what he'd do. I stopped him mid interview and pulled up my resume on my phone. I handed it to him and asked him to read a few lines. Then I asked him to read a few lines that were verbatim from his resume. His face lost all color and he shuddered. There is simply no way I was buying that he and I both came up with the following 3 lines in a row:
* Re-implemented the global dns/ldap setup for higher availability. Used keepalived for auto-failover
* High performance computing, benchmarking, and kernel tuning. Constant review of upstream kernel activity
* Maintenance and engineering on a from scratch Linux distribution in support of high volume electronic trading
Amongst two or three additional ones, it was too much of a cooincidence. He swore that the recruiter had doctored his resume and that the recruiter was a liar. I gave him a shot at doing tech for the rest of the interview. However, I turned it up to 11 and was visibly agitated at this point that he'd stolen from my work trying to market myself. Now I'm normally extremely friendly in interviews, but teched him so hard it hurt my brain. He failed miserably.
We told his recruiter the story and said if it was true we were going to immediately stop doing business with that recruiter and his company. He quickly and happily forwarded us every single email from that candidate clearly showing they'd done nothing other than rearrange the styling and put their awful logo on it. The recruiter decided to stop working with this candidate as well.
Moral of the story: Don't steal people's resume, they work hard making it and that is dishonest. Don't lie to technical people about your technical skills. It will ruin your future career prospects.
You sound like a huge asshole. You knew going into this you wouldn't hire him, yet you wasted his time anyway. You make it sound like he plagiarized a book you wrote and was trying to sell his own. He found people that worded their resume really well and decided to use it for his own. It's not like there's some sanctity to the wording of resumes. Get over yourself.
Correction, he wasted my time, but interviewing for a position he wasn't remotely qualified to perform. Honestly is the most important trait in any team member. How do you not see this?
Dialing up the interview to 11 means that you are now a confounding factor to your own hiring processes. Removal of confounding factors means an improved ability of a company to develop evidence-based hiring strategies.
It sounds like you react to dishonesty with bad faith acts of your own, since you had no interest in giving that person a standard opportunity. The way you reacted sounds emotional and personal.
Because job listings are overwhelmingly asking for more than they mean. "10+ years experience" means "a couple years if we like you". "CS degree or similar required" may as well not be there on the listings that have it. The responsibility of figuring out whether they're qualified is yours, not the candidate's. How the hell is he supposed to know what your needs are? You should have figured this out in an email or quick phone screen.
Additionally, you're a terrible interviewer if someone is failing miserably. There is no valuable data to use from this situation. Turn it down until they stop failing, and see how far it can be pushed. I'm sure you know this, but decided to be a prick instead.
There's nothing dishonest about using wording from someone else's resume. If I did it and someone asked about it, I'd definitely say "I saw how someone else phrased it and found it really good, so I used it too" and obviously wouldn't put it down if it wasn't true. This guy probably would have said something similar if you didn't throw it in his face and make him so uncomfortable.
The concept of it being amoral to plagiarize a resume is laughable. He's not creating some original piece of writing or trying to demonstrating his writing abilities. He's not submitting some piece of writing as part of his job responsibilities or for any sort of publication.
He's conveying facts on a piece of paper that is handed to, at most, a few dozen people, who glance it at for about 20 seconds and then never see it again. He's not even implicitly claiming that everything on his resume is 100% unique, because more than half of resumes use the same structuring, wording, and general descriptive approaches. I thought this was common sense until your comment.
Calling this plagiarism is like saying the sentence "By using our Services, you are agreeing to these terms" in a terms of service is plagiarizing whoever wound up writing that first. It's ridiculous.
Then you have a differing opinion from me and SEJeff on what is needed to create a good résumé. If all it required were a reciting of simple facts, then presumably the candidate would not need to have copied from SEJeff. I don't have to look at other people's work when writing the school I attended or year that I graduated, or number of years that I have in some skillset.
Perhaps you think that it wasn't actual plagiarism? That it could've been coincidence, or that SEJeff's phrasing is so routine that it doesn't count as something with real investment of thought? Have you tried Googling it?
"Re-implemented the global dns/ldap setup for higher availability. Used keepalived for auto-failover"
There are exactly 5 results, 2 of them which originate from this current discussion. That's just one of the bulletpoints, nevermind the same 3 in the same order.
For reference's sake, the odds that Melania Trump didn't plagiarize the following sentence from Michelle Obama -- values that you work hard for what you want in life that your word is your bond and you do what you say -- is about one in a trillion [0]
Well it was my original work, that I spent a lot of time on. I found it terribly insulting that he blatantly ripped much of it off, AND that he couldn't at least back a single bit of it up. I guess you wouldn't mind if someone totally ripped off something you worked hard on and passed it off as their own? Totally cool, right?
I don't quite understand the other replies, or maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think you did wrong except maybe not kicking him out your office sooner. Since when is it okay to lie on your resume? Seriously, is that a cultural thing maybe? IMO, it's fine to word things so that they sound more impressive (also, many people would understate their real achievements otherwise), but to state actual untruths, falsehoods in your resume?
I'd say that's when the interview is over. What are you thinking, "well they may have proven to be untrustworthy and willing to lie to my face, but hey let's continue the interview and see if they have any redeeming qualities to make up for it".
I'd have asked them a few short low-ball questions about those three lines (just to have them dig a whole with some vague answers). Then confront them with the original, watch/enjoy the reaction for a short moment, and calmly tell them to get out of my office. No need to waste much more time on it than that.
Or are people suggesting that, maybe, this candidate might just actually have had experience with projects fitting those exact three descriptions, and merely Googled and copied the wording for its eloquence? Which would be plagiarism but not quite outright dishonesty. Kind of. Also I wouldn't believe it for a minute.
I've always written my resume somewhat uniquely for SEO[1] and happen to work quite heavily in the Linux space. At the time several years ago, my resume was on the first or second page google search results for something along the lines of "linux system administrator" and variations.
The stars must have aligned as some poor schmuck thought he'd spruce up his resume by copy & pasting lines verbatim from the first 4-5 good Linux resumes he found via google. Unfortunately for him, one of them was mine. Also unfortunately for him, I'm known as a very technical interviewer that doesn't take any bs.
So besides the fact he wasn't qualified from a technical perspective for this position, I decided to see what he'd do. I stopped him mid interview and pulled up my resume on my phone. I handed it to him and asked him to read a few lines. Then I asked him to read a few lines that were verbatim from his resume. His face lost all color and he shuddered. There is simply no way I was buying that he and I both came up with the following 3 lines in a row:
Amongst two or three additional ones, it was too much of a cooincidence. He swore that the recruiter had doctored his resume and that the recruiter was a liar. I gave him a shot at doing tech for the rest of the interview. However, I turned it up to 11 and was visibly agitated at this point that he'd stolen from my work trying to market myself. Now I'm normally extremely friendly in interviews, but teched him so hard it hurt my brain. He failed miserably.We told his recruiter the story and said if it was true we were going to immediately stop doing business with that recruiter and his company. He quickly and happily forwarded us every single email from that candidate clearly showing they'd done nothing other than rearrange the styling and put their awful logo on it. The recruiter decided to stop working with this candidate as well.
Moral of the story: Don't steal people's resume, they work hard making it and that is dishonest. Don't lie to technical people about your technical skills. It will ruin your future career prospects.
[1] http://www.digitalprognosis.com/resume.htm