Would I Lie To UEA?

Prepare yourself for a shock: someone has lied on their CV. No, not someone subtly upping their GCSE Geography grade, but a 51 year old litigator working for a prestigious law firm’s London office. To be fair, Dennis O’Riordan’s lies were pretty ambitious, inventing a degree from Oxford and a masters from Harvard to sit on top of his very real UEA law degree. That’s right, someone thought that UEA wouldn’t look good enough on a job application.

You’d have a hard time finding someone who has never varnished the truth while applying for a job. My A-level History teacher once told us the cautionary tale of his doomed attempts to persuade an interviewer that he was a fellow scuba diving enthusiast. Pretend hobbies and exaggerated truths are a far cry from an entire fake academic career though. It’s a small wonder that O’Riordan’s CV didn’t also list him as a ‘Unicorn Hunter.’

In fact, after a career spanning several banks and law firms, O’Riordan was only found out when he claimed he had received a prestigious scholarship in the same year as one of his interviewers. It’s tempting to imagine the interviewer then leapt up, slapped him, and screamed ‘busted!’

Clearly lying outright on your CV is a staggeringly dumb thing to do. The bigger question is why he felt he needed to? The depressing part of this whole story is that by all account, O’Riordan was pretty good at his job. His humble UEA taught skills seemed to be enough to get him a high flying job.

If his success was due to his performance, it raises the question of why a talented man thought that UEA wouldn’t look good enough on paper. Did his bosses at law firm Paul Hastings really just assume that his success could surely only be explained by the powers of an Oxbridge degree? Did they base their recruitment policy on past winners of University Challenge?

Have we even been on since then?

It’s hard to defend such an idiotic case of boasting as Dennis O’Riordan’s. But it is easy to sympathise, when it seems that some top employers still cling to the belief that graduates from universities like UEA can’t possibly be as good as those from Oxbridge. Employers would do well to remember that they’re hiring people, not a University.