Verifying technical claims on a résumé

A résumé is a claim someone wrote about themselves. A background check confirms a different set of claims: that the employer existed, that the dates line up, that the degree was awarded. Both are worth having. Neither tells you whether the person who wrote "ran Kubernetes in production" ran Kubernetes in production.

The gap is not fraud in the sense a verification vendor uses the word. It is inflation — a line that was true of the team rather than the individual, a project the candidate sat two desks away from, a certification passed without the work behind it. It comes through a standard background package intact, because every fact on the record is accurate.

What closes it is a different kind of question rather than a stronger check. Ask the claim one layer deeper than the candidate prepared for: managed or self-managed, which distro, how many nodes, which CNI plugin, what upgrade strategy, which incident they actually debugged. Someone who ran it answers in the order they lived it. Someone who watched it answers in the order the documentation is written. Then have them do it, because a claim is a description and a working artifact is a demonstration.