A time traveler applied to work for us. He didn’t get hired.

The thin line between ambition and moral bankruptcy isn’t just about what we do but what we allow from others. In the end, we are what we tolerate.

The fabulous Katie Scarpa recently opened a role for an Integration Specialist on her team at Oceans. And almost immediately, she sent me a very impressive resume to look at. The candidate’s claim to fame? Inventing time travel.

Oddly, he didn’t explicitly mention his invention. But the first job on his resume was “Integration Specialist at Oceans”, which he apparently has been doing since October of last year. And that’s a truly impressive feat, since we just posted for the first hire on this team a few weeks ago.

Now if it were me and I invented time travel, you better believe that would be my resume headline. But no, this humble candidate just slipped it in casually, like it was no big deal. “I’m already an Integration Specialist at Oceans, so you should…hire me to be an Integration Specialist at Oceans.”

It makes sense, until it doesn’t.

This is apparently now a common tactic: trying to trick algorithmic resume screening by telling it that you’re perfect for the job by pretending you already do it. Presumably, once you cheat your way past the system, the hiring manager is supposed to respect your hustle and want to meet you so you can shoot your shot.

It reminds me of Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix (I haven’t watched it but my partner loves telling me about it). She was relating a scene in which the main character Belle bluffs her way into a publishing meeting by pretending to have an appointment. Belle confesses the lie, lies again and gets caught, but the publisher accepts her anyway and just suggests lies that will sell better to the public.

Bluffing your way into a meeting is the sort of thing you hear about in startup culture all the time; it is meant to be a sign of how determined and gritty you are. If the lie is discovered, it becomes a form of recommendation: look how hard I’ll work to make this startup succeed.

The liars aren’t all that interesting to me because I understand the candidate who looks at the current job market and in desperation to simply be seen, fakes a resume to get past the screener. They probably tell themselves it isn’t a lie, that the hiring manager will know they are simply hustling, and that Shakespeare had it right: “My poverty and not my will consents.”

What interests me is the hiring manager who goes along with it. The investor or publisher who decides that lying is a virtue, not a liability. It isn’t Romeo and Juliet; it is Macbeth – being a lord but wanting to be king.

All of us are at least sometimes in positions of power. We choose where to spend our money, time, attention, and love. And there will always be people who don’t have enough of those things and so will do what they feel they must to get them. Which means that the limiting factor in the development of our culture is how we choose to allocate scarce resources, more than how we choose to pursue them.

Faking your resume to get past AI doesn’t work at Oceans because a human reads every application (we even say it at the top of our job postings!). And we don’t reward deceit, whether it comes from determination or desperation. Because celebrating growth and creating opportunity means being a good steward of those resources, even if it means losing out on hiring the inventor of time travel (he’d probably just get us stuck in a temporal paradox anyway). Sure, you might miss out on that rare apothecary whose willingness to hustle gets you more More MORE…but at the end of the day, you are what you accept. So accept better.