About 75 percent of Russians admit to lying during job interviews, and Muscovites are the most likely to deceive potential employers, while residents of Vladivostok are the least likely.
Those were some of the results of a poll by Rabota@Mail.ru, which surveyed 160,880 Internet users between the ages of 18 and 50 from several Russian cities between Aug. 1 and Aug. 31.
Only a quarter of Russians have never lied during a job interview, the poll results said.
According to the survey, Moscow scored lowest on the “honesty index,” with 17.2 percent of respondents saying they had never deceived a potential employer. Vladivostok scored highest, at 37.5 percent.
By comparison, 19.4 percent of respondents in St. Petersburg tell employers the truth. Other figures for the same indicator include 20.6 percent in Yekaterinburg , 23.2 percent in Kazan, 26.1 percent in Chelyabinsk, 27.7 percent in Samara and 33.2 percent in Novosibirsk.
Respondents lie most often about their knowledge of foreign languages. A quarter of respondents said they were willing to embellish their language skills to get a job. That number was 35.2 percent in Kazan and 28.2 percent in Chelyabinsk. In Samara and Novosibirsk, only one in five respondents think it is acceptable to conceal his or her true language competency.
Lying about one's age is less common. It usually happens among applicants older than 40, who understate their age by two or three years. Residents of Samara, Chelyabinsk, Moscow and Kazan use this trick more often than other Russians, the poll indicated. In those cities, more than 29 percent of respondents said they didn't consider it a shameful thing to do.
The majority of Russians — if one excludes the residents of St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg — tell the truth about their job responsibilities.
There is a cultural aspect to these tendencies. There is no tradition in Russia of blacklisting candidates who lie during job interviews, so cheaters have an incentive to lie repeatedly since they get away with it.