Who would have thought it? After being caught lying on his CV, Lee McQueen wins the Apprentice! In the hours following the show the media was obviously quick to comment. My favourite (so far) came from Nancy Banks-Smith of the Guardian.

“Oh, sugar! Like a bird to a worm, Sir Alan Sugar infallibly zeros in on the wrong candidate. Last night he hired Lee McQueen as The Apprentice (BBC1). Lee is the one whose spelling was so chaotic he may be dyslexic, and who claimed on his CV to have spent two years at university whereas, in fact, he left after four months. He can also do an impression of a reverse pterodactyl though not, of course, spell it.”

What message does this give to the recruitment industry as a whole? Are we going to see a rush of people eagerly rewriting their CV’s because they think lying is going to secure them a £100,000 a year position?

Earlier this year, Personnel Today published an article telling us that dishonesty was increasingly prevalent among 36 to 40 year olds with 62.9% of CVs screened containing at least one discrepancy. Discrepancies were particularly prominent in employment and academic dates, fictitious professional qualifications, omitted County Court Judgments, and undeclared directorships.

Stretching the truth on CV’s is commonplace. Who hasn’t made their job sound more impressive than it actually is? Whilst some might consider this a ‘white lie’ it still proves that the applicant is capable of being dishonest and do you really want to hire a dishonest applicant?

A CV used to be considered one of the most important documents you would ever write, but it seems that candidates are becoming far more slapdash, with today's applications now riddled with basic errors, spelling mistakes and 'typos'. How can that be? Almost everybody types their CV into a word processing package like MS Word. Word has an inbuilt spelling and grammar checker. Even if people can’t be bothered to use it, surely they notice the red wavy line that appears under a misspelt word! Does this point to a poor education or are job seekers simply becoming lazy?

I’ve got a feeling that Sir Alan Sugar’s decision is going to cause many debates over the coming days.

Did he make the right choice? We’d love to hear your views about his decision and the declining standards of CV’s as a whole.