School loan payments are due, your best friend just snagged a high-paying dream job while you toil at the bottom of the employment ladder, and you've stumbled across a new opening that requires qualifications beyond your experience. For a job-seeker, the temptation to spice up a resume with an inflated salary and a more impressive job title looms large.

But these days, employers check backgrounds with eagle eyes -- and don't look kindly on candidates who falsify their credentials. In an August 2004 survey that the Society for Human Resource Management did of 2,500 of its members who are HR professionals, 96% said their companies always check references, credentials or both.

ResumeDoctor.com, a South Burlington, Vt.-based service that advises job hunters on resume-writing, conducted a survey in 2005 of 1,133 resumes that had been uploaded to its site, which offers a free preliminary review. It found that 42.7% had at least one inaccuracy, and 12.6% had two or more factual errors.

The research team at ResumeDoctor.com made calls to the educational and employment institutions listed on the resumes to verify three sections: dates of employment, job titles or roles, and education. The resumes weren't from ResumeDoctor.com clients, so their creators weren't alerted to the findings. (Had they been clients, Michael Worthington, co-founder of ResumeDoctor.com, says the company would have stressed to them the need to be 100% truthful.)

Some of the inaccuracies they found related to employment dates were the result of a job seeker trying to cover up periods of unemployment, he says. "People are lying when they don't have to. Companies understand that being out of work can be the norm," Mr. Worthington notes.

Embellishing a job title or educational qualifications are red flags for potential employers, too. "With education, they're saying they have a degree but never actually finished the requirements," Mr. Worthington says. "You should say how many credits you are into it."

David Callahan, who wrote the book "The Cheating Culture," says the dog-eat-dog mentality of American society can drive people to exaggerate credentials. "People have always fudged their resumes. That's not a new phenomenon," he adds. "People are more anxious about the economy these days than they were in the '90s."

Checking can be arduous. Large firms may outsource background checks to other companies, but in many smaller companies, the burden rests on the organization. Elaine Hahn, president and chief investment officer of Hahn Capital Management in San Francisco, says it took her three-partner firm nine months to hire two analysts. "We don't want to hire and fire people left and right because we are a small firm and the hiring process is long.

"We got hundreds of resumes. Unfortunately there are a lot of misstatements," says Ms. Hahn. "Someone says they're a senior research analyst, but they're really an associate." Once she or one of her partners found a discrepancy in a resume, they took that candidate out of consideration. (The two analysts they finally hired started work last April.)

"When you embellish it speaks to your integrity," says Deidra Adams, principal human-resources consultant for Constellation Energy Group Inc. in Baltimore. Ms. Adams notes that when most companies discover an exaggeration, they simply don't move forward with that candidacy.

"Chances are the people you provide as references are going to say something good about you," Ms. Adams notes. The hiring manager "should ask if it's OK to call a former supervisor or someone who has done a performance review on the candidate, even if they're not listed as a reference."

And word of mouth can speak volumes. "Everyone knows someone," she says. "They can get informal information about a candidate, and it's easy to find someone who has knowledge of a person."