Crederity Building Trust Date:   Tuesday , June 02, 2009 Recently one of the top IT services company in India laid off a few hundred people with fake education backgrounds and experience. Needless to say, recruiting hundreds of people, training them, and managing them are highly expensive. But when a company finds the guy whom they have recruited is not sufficiently qualified to do his job and had produced fake experience and education certificates the company has to remove him. The company cannot afford to take chances in such issues. Hence they adopt several measures to tackle this issue. Well, there are very few vendors who offer technology solutions for this too; Crederity is one of these. Crederity was a spinout from graduate-undergraduate student collaboration within the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. After the founders won honors from Wharton in 2005 for their concept and technology, they set up shop in New York City and Philadelphia and spent over a year assessing the needs of potential users, the founding team set out to prove the viability of their concept in Bangalore, India, in the summer of 2007. “Crederity is a new service that applies sophisticated technologies and programs to help people and businesses easily establish trust on the Internet,” says founder and CEO Rakish Antala. As the Web’s first guaranteed trust builder, Crederity enables people and businesses to certify their own integrity and that of others. The company has developed proprietary fact verification technologies enabling people to verify identity and credentials including background, education, and employment history. Crederity’s comprehensive suite of verification tools is used to confirm pertinent Trust Facts, and award each verified user a Crederity Card and the Crederity Trust Seal. This emblem of trustworthiness can be associated with the users’ resumes, online profiles, blogs, identity, experience, education, references, certifications, online feedback, social networks, and more, empowering them as a person of integrity. When asked why he chose India as a major market for their product, Antala certainly gave a strong reason. Explicates Antala, “Given the lack of a functioning ID system in India, and increasing reports of serious frauds, the founders realized that the country would be a perfect testing ground and stress test for identity and credential authentication.” Also, pre-employment screening has emerged as one of the most important steps in the hiring process for major staffing companies that are dealing with thousands of candidates every day. According to SHRM survey, 52 percent of job seekers are said to have made some sort of false claim on their resumes and it is estimated that the replacement cost for a bad hire is 1.5 to 3.5 times the salary of the job that he is being hired for. 86 percent of recruiters who took part in the same survey preferred to hire candidates with verified resumes. “The Crederity Verified Seal is a symbol of trust and authenticity that helps make your first impression your best impression,” claims Antala. Being Crederity Verified means that people you meet can be more assured that you are who you say you are and lends additional credibility to the good reputation you’ve built up over the years. “In times of economic slowdown, when hiring freezes, our methodology works best since those with pre-verified credentials are preferred over others. Our solutions would be a win-win solution for all involved – the candidate, staffing company, and its client,” he concludes.