Misrepresenting abilities ... yes, I did that in my first job interview. The job posting said PHP, HTML, MySQL skills. Well, I knew HTML well enough but my PHP and MySQL skills were from a few side projects doing copy-paste-modify with PHP BB's code base to make my own web app, which I never did finish. So I only kinda/sorta knew those languages.
But then at the end of the interview I was given a coding challenge to do at home over the next few days. PHP and MySQL have good online documentation so I was able to knock it out quickly and I got the job. So, yes I misrepresented my skills, but I also knew I could live up to what I was claiming I could do.
Yes, it seems that most companies misrepresent their requirements in job postings. It also seems that most candidates misrepresent their skills in responding to those job postings. There's a certain symmetry there.
Employer: First job out of school pay, requires four years of experience in our exact tech stack.
Candidate: Sure I'm willing to take first job out of school pay (BTW, just graduated in May). Yeah, totally have 4 years of experience, and what do you know, it covers exactly your tech stack!
I actually really like the take-home coding challenge, ideally something a qualified candidate could do in 1-2 hours and inspired by a real on-the-job problem (perhaps distilled a bit). It gives me much more insight into your coding style and is a much more low key, realistic test – especially since my team is fully remote anyway.
OTOH, for example, at a certain (non-IT) company, they overblow requirements for the most junior IT posts in such a way that the ONLY people they're able to hire are people that lie about their experience/abilities on their interviews (and there's no technical interview, so they can do so at will). They're optimizing their recruiting process in a very, well, weird way.
But then at the end of the interview I was given a coding challenge to do at home over the next few days. PHP and MySQL have good online documentation so I was able to knock it out quickly and I got the job. So, yes I misrepresented my skills, but I also knew I could live up to what I was claiming I could do.