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Hire, liar: Job candidates are not the only ones prone to exaggeration and a lack of realism.
招聘与欺骗：容易夸大其词且不注重实际的不只是求职者
Hiring processes can be thought of as a battle between candour and dishonesty. You might imagine this is a simple fight between truth-seeking firms and self-promoting candidates, and to a certain extent it is. But companies themselves are prone to bend reality out of shape in ways that are self-defeating.
招聘过程可以被看作是真诚和欺骗之间的一场战斗。你可能会认为这是追求真实的公司和自我推销的应聘者之间的一场简单斗争，在某种程度上的确如此。但企业本身也往往会扭曲现实并弄巧成拙。
Start with the obvious culprits: job applicants. The point of a CV or a LinkedIn profile is to massage reality into the most appealing shape possible.
先从明显的罪魁祸首说起：求职者。简历或领英个人资料的用处是尽可能地将现实美化成最具吸引力的形象。
Everyone beyond a certain level of experience is a transformational leader personally responsible for generating millions in revenue; the world economy would be about 15 times bigger than it actually is if all such claims were true.
超过一定经验水平的人都是能带来革新的领导者，全凭个人创造了数百万美元的收入，如果这些说法都是真的，那么世界经济规模将是实际规模的15倍左右。
The average Briton spends four and a half hours a day watching TV and online videos. But the average job candidate uses their spare time only for worthy purposes, like volunteering in soup kitchens or teaching orphans to code.
英国人平均每天花四个半小时看电视和网络视频。但普通求职者只把业余时间用于有价值的事，比如在施舍处做志愿者，或者教孤儿编程。
The cover letter is so open in its insincerity ("When I saw the advertisement for this job, I almost fainted with excitement") that people are starting not to bother with it. At the interview stage one task facing the firm's recruiters is to winkle out the truth of what a person actually contributed to a project.
求职信的不真诚已经到了开诚布公的地步（当我看到这份工作的招聘广告时，我几乎兴奋得晕倒了），以至于人们变得根本懒得去读它。在面试阶段，公司招聘人员的一项任务是努力弄清这个人到底对项目做出了什么贡献。
Those hoary questions about a candidate's weaknesses and failures are there for a reason; no one will bring them up unprompted. Cognitive and behavioural tests are useful in part because they are harder for applicants to game.
关于应聘者有何缺点和失败经历的老掉牙的问题是有存在必要的，毕竟没有人会主动谈起这些话题。认知和行为测试之所以有用，在一定程度上是因为申请者更难在这上面钻空子。
But a tendency to stretch the truth infects companies as well as applicants. The typical firm will write a job description that invariably describes the work environment as fast-paced and innovative, and then lays out a set of improbable requirements for the "ideal candidate", someone who almost by definition does not exist.
但是，歪曲事实的倾向不仅影响应聘者，也影响公司。这类典型的公司会写一份工作职责说明，其中描述的工作环境总是快节奏和充满创新氛围的，然后对理想的候选人提出一系列不可能达到的要求，符合要求的人几乎是不可能存在的。
Sometimes -- as when ads demand more years of experience in a programming language than that language has existed for -- these requirements include an ability to go back and alter the course of history.
有时（比如招聘启事要求对某种编程语言的经验比该语言存在的时间还长）要达到这些要求，需要有回到过去、改写历史的能力。
