@spellingbead while I’ve never had anyone ask for my transcripts, I most certainly have had to provide my SS# to employers. Also, any background check would show my previous addresses, and at least one of those was from the town where my college is located (not a dorm on campus, but an apartment). I also had two campus jobs that involved school publications, and keep copies of them should someone wish to see examples of my writing. So it’s clear that I was a student there. However, I’ve done a search for myself on the college website, and I do NOT show up there.
However, keep in mind this took place during a period(end of '90s till 2001 dotcom crash) when the demand for techies was so high that even folks with just a smidgen of computing experience could have been hired and trained on the job in the computer programming/IT field and have several companies competing to hire them.
Most of the people with his supposed skillset tended to be hired away almost as soon as their resumes are seen by HR/tech hiring managers as the demand for such talent was so fierce back then.
One issue was most HR folks aren’t technical enough to understand what’s actually required for a position and even many long-established companies weren’t familiar with conducting thorough background checks on overseas applicants with foreign educational credentials.
The incident I witnessed/reported along with a colleague actually took place in the Boston area in a medium sized financial company.
Should the OP’s actions depend upon whether or not he joins the company?
I interviewed someone who lied about her prior job. She even misspelled the (relatively obscure) name on the resume. My office manager really leaned towards hiring her. By coincidence, my wife knew the employer and called and the prospective employee had not worked in the job listed. Bullet dodged.
I am not aware of someone lying about degrees – I tend to hire people from the school I taught at and a couple of others. We call references and would likely know, but I don’t know how robust our procedures are generally.
I was working at a well-known financial company in San Francisco and we were looking for programming contractors. There was one Indian-owned contracting company that sent us about a dozen resumes, all of which were almost word-for-word the same except for the name of the job candidate. (All the job candidates were Indian.) It turns out the problem was with the contracting company sending us boilerplate resumes. When I showed the resumes to the job candidates, they said they had never seen the resumes before.
I’m a software contractor, and every time I go to a new job, they do a background check. Part of that is checking that that degrees listed are genuine.
I, personally, don’t fault the OP for looking co-workers up online to see if what they are saying about themselves is true. I’m a curious person myself, and you can easily look up people without spending any money or (directly) invading their privacy. But OP asked what to do about it: the answer, I think, is nothing, unless you have some responsibility to do something about it. You might have some ethical duty to your employer to reveal the lie if it potentially could harm the company. For example, if you found out that the general counsel wasn’t actually a lawyer, that might have some pretty serious consequences.
Someone In my high school class went to Western Michigan University for college. He has now moved to California, and I see that the college he displays on Facebook has morphed into Northwestern University. Lol
This is the only correct answer. Frankly, whether or not they are lying (and you not being able to verify it as an armchair validator when people are paid money to do this, means nothing), it’s not your problem. It’s not your fight, it doesn’t affect you in any meaningful way, and it doesn’t do you any good to make enemies if it’s not a matter of self-preservation.
The professionally prudent thing is to forget about it and mind your own business.