Addison Group's 2026 Skill Security Report puts a number on a hiring-process vulnerability that many talent acquisition leaders have suspected but rarely quantified: 36% of working and job-seeking Americans, approximately 64 million people, say they have faked their knowledge, skills, or expertise to gain an advantage in the labor market. For HR directors and CHROs, the operative question is not how to catch more people bluffing, but why the incentive to do so is this strong, and what process changes can reduce it.

What the Skill Security Report found

The 2026 Skill Security Report is Addison Group's first edition of this study, published on 27 October 2026 and based on a survey conducted by Wired Research among working and job-seeking adults across the United States. The headline figure is derived by applying the survey's 36% response rate to the 2025 U.S. Census adult population, which is how a share of respondents becomes a figure in the tens of millions.

The surrounding data points give the 36% figure its weight. 93% of respondents said building a career has become harder over the past five years, and 83% took at least one step in the past year to stay competitive. The most common step, cited by 43%, was self-teaching an AI tool. Read together, these figures describe a workforce that is actively trying to close skill gaps, and covering what it cannot close with exaggeration. Respondents who admitted inflating their credentials said they did so because they felt pressure to appear capable and remain competitive.

Why candidates overstate, and why AI has lowered the barrier

The pressure explanation is consistent across multiple data sources. In a May 2025 survey by AI Resume Builder, 10% of job seekers said they had misrepresented aspects of their resume, including years of experience and job responsibilities. Soozy Miller, head of career advising at AI Resume Builder, tied the behavior to a difficult hiring environment, noting that candidates feel the job market is so competitive that misrepresenting credentials to secure a role can feel justified.

Generative AI has compounded the problem by reducing the effort required to produce polished, tailored application materials. A candidate can now generate a credible-sounding resume, a role-specific cover letter, and rehearsed responses to standard interview questions in a short amount of time. This has made what HR Dive's coverage of the Addison Group report labels skillfishing, claiming capabilities a candidate does not actually possess, considerably harder to detect from documents alone. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which represents approximately 340,000 HR professionals in the United States, has consistently flagged AI-enabled misrepresentation as an emerging verification challenge in its hiring practice guidance. Assessment design, rather than document review, is the recommended response.

What this means for hiring reliability and retention

For talent acquisition teams, the structural implication is that a resume carries less signal than it did five years ago. If roughly one in three applicants has stretched the truth somewhere in their materials, keyword matching and credential filters tend to surface the most confident self-presenters rather than the most capable candidates. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks job openings and labor turnover through its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), and elevated quit rates in recent years have kept replacement costs high, making bad hires more costly than in lower-turnover periods.

The cost of a skills-inflating hire does not stop at the offer letter. A new employee who overstated a core competency typically surfaces the gap within the first quarter, through slower ramp-up, rework absorbed by teammates, or sustained performance stress that tips into burnout and attrition. Those downstream costs land on line managers and on headcount budgets, not on the recruiter who closed the role. Turnover driven by a poor skills match also carries potential exposure under Department of Labor (DOL) regulations where employment contracts or state wage-payment laws intersect with separation agreements, a nuance that HR counsel should review at the policy level.

There is also a signal embedded in the requirements themselves. When a job description treats every skill the team might eventually need as a day-one mandatory, candidates face a binary: rule themselves out or round up. The Addison Group data suggest that a large share of the labor market is choosing the second option. Auditing job descriptions for requirement inflation is among the lowest-cost interventions available to a talent acquisition function.

Four moves that reduce the incentive to misrepresent

The goal of the following adjustments is not to catch more applicants in a lie. It is to build a hiring process in which overstating skills stops paying off, and in which candidates who are close but not fully qualified see learning as a more attractive option than concealment.

• Assess, do not infer. Replace a portion of the resume screen with work samples, short practical tasks, or structured interview stages tied directly to the real responsibilities of the role. A demonstrated skill is far harder to misrepresent than a listed one, and structured assessments also strengthen defensibility under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, since standardized criteria applied consistently reduce disparate-impact risk.
• Separate must-have from trainable. Audit job descriptions and distinguish which skills are genuinely required on day one from those your organization can develop within the first months. Fewer inflated requirements mean less pressure on candidates to round up, and a cleaner basis for performance management if a hire falls short.
• Make learning investment visible before the offer. 63% of workers in the Addison Group survey said they wanted more learning and development, including on-the-job skills learning, professional development, and AI training. Surfacing that investment in the job posting rather than only in the onboarding materials changes the cost-benefit calculation for candidates who are close but not complete, and differentiates the employer brand in a competitive talent market.
• Publish skills frameworks and promotion criteria. Respondents also expressed a clear preference for transparency about career advancement pathways and the skills they will need in the future. Published frameworks give candidates and employees a legitimate route to growth rather than a reason to overstate current capability.

Demand for this kind of organizational support is close to universal in the Addison Group dataset: 95% of respondents said at least one form of employer support would increase their confidence in building a career. Thomas Moran, CEO of Addison Group, frames the employer's responsibility in both technical and interpersonal terms:

"help people develop both, creating pathways for their employees to take on new challenges, grow in their careers, and contribute in ways they haven't before."

For HR leaders considering where to allocate a learning and development budget, WorldatWork's annual Salary Budget Survey provides peer benchmarks on L&D spend by industry and organization size, which can anchor an internal business case more effectively than a directional industry average alone.

Closing the loop with real employee data

Assessment-based hiring and visible L&D investment only reduce the skills-inflation dynamic if the commitments made during recruitment hold up after day one. That is where verified employee feedback becomes operationally relevant for HR decision-makers. Patterns in employer reviews indicate whether staff actually experience the training, mentoring, and career-path clarity that job postings describe, and where the distance between employer brand and lived workplace reality is widening.

Comparing the development support your organization offers against what peer employers provide, alongside salary benchmarks for the roles where skill gaps are sharpest, helps identify whether an upskilling budget will do more work than a higher compensation offer. In a market where 36% of candidates may be overstating their qualifications, the organizations with the clearest picture of their own workforce, and of what competitors are actually delivering, are better positioned to hire with fewer surprises and to retain the people they hire.

A labor market in which 36% of participants admit to inflating their skills is not primarily an honesty problem. It is a structural mismatch between what job descriptions demand and what candidate pools can realistically offer. Organizations that test for skills, invest in closing the gap through learning, and give employees a transparent path to advancement are better placed to hire accurately and to keep the people they hire.