How common is it for development job applicants to lie about their skillsets and experience?

Had an applicant come interview for a senior software engineer role, has been in the same company for 8 years and his resume is sprayed with almost every tech speciality and language there is, claims to be proficient in 8+ languages, done AWS server migrations, built CI/CD pipelines from scratch, written CloudFormation scripts, built microservices, worked with AWS services and serverless platforms, has managed a team, does salary and performance reviews

My gut feeling is when someone claims to have knowledge and experience across multiple specialities, they’re skills in any of those domains are only skin deep

The modern resume is a marketing/sales document.

I work for a dev shop and someone can get put on a new client project as frequently as every 3 months (usually we stay on for 6-12 months, sometimes more though). They can be exposed to a lot of different stuff. So I can see someone becoming pretty good at all those things, but I’m not sure if you’d be an expert at all of them. You’ll have to do some more investigating but someone like that isn’t impossible, just not likely.

@52cal the same here.

I had C# on my resume while I had only touched it twice. But Im a quick learner and no one has noticed Im learning on the job. Same with angular. Im quicker than most on the job

Look, did he seem like he knew his stuff at the interview? Because if yes invite for a second one as a "more in-depth" interview to test his code quality (If he's got good code in the said language, then he's probably pretty familiar (or even proficient) in it too), if he's good, take him, you don't want to lose a guy like that...

Also if he were lying, he would be proficient in a lot more than just 8 languages...

It all depends what you call proficient, and what you count in as a separate language.

For example, I started out as a Java/Android Developer, so I can still write Java and Android on my resume, even if it was pretty much the same back in the day.

After that I did a lot of .Net, mainly in C#, and a little vb.net. Basically, 2 other languages, but they are pretty much the same again when you really get in to it.

I also did quite a bit of web development. So HTML, CSS, JS and later typescript. JS and typescript are again, very similar. And when you do web you need HTML/CSS knowledge.

So there you go, proficiency in 8 languages, but in reality I'm just saying the same thing a few times over.

Also, as for Git & ci/cd. I'm setting up that stuff in my current job. I was used to using it in previous jobs, but I never did the set up. It isn't that much of a skill though. As a dev you usually are pretty good at using google, that goes a loooong way.

@chabad360 Yeah we haven’t disregarded the applicant as this was just the first meeting, proceeded to the next stage which is a take home programming assessment. Let’s see how his code is then we can get a better picture

I hope you find my comment germane to the issue, but it is ten of five Thursday morning and I'm in need of something other than coffee and half and half to keep me brain going...
In 1995, my brother in law created a CV for me that was slickety slick, more froth than matter, a thimbleful of fact in a sea of château bottled bullshit. During the first interview for the job I eventually was hired for, the hiring manager actually preferred the tidged up CV when compared with the one I created, wh. was just the facts with no butter knifing over periods where I didn't work. I still don't understand. Maybe that's what this candidate did.

A greed!