Background Checks and their Importance Date:   Tuesday , May 03, 2011 It is not uncommon to hear of a couple of employees getting caught in a BPO company for passing out data to a client’s competitor for a consideration, a couple of bank employees manipulating some of their client’s accounts to transfer funds to their own accounts, or a candidate seeking a job with a fake resume or even a fake degree certificate. Is it not just recently that we heard of a couple of pilots who had produced fake certificates on their flying hours? In one of the organizations that I worked earlier, we had an employee who was assigned to a particular client’s project. On the insistence of the client all team members assigned to their project had to undergo a background check. This check showed that the employee, who was an excellent performer for over two years in the organization, had a fake post graduation certificate. The person never went to the university nor did he actually do a post graduation. Initially, the employee denied the charge but when he was repeatedly questioned he broke down and accepted his fault. Technology advances rapidly and new tools get introduced almost every week. Organizations embracing this technology and tools do insist on a certain amount of experience while hiring. Employees upgrade their knowledge quite fast by attending classes or using the internet but find no means of getting work experience on the same. When they see organizations asking for such an experience, the easiest route adopted by many of the youngsters today is to fake their resume by replacing one of the skills on which they have worked for long by the skill the organization is looking for. I have, during various interviews, observed candidates who have converted a couple of their projects using VB to Oracle because that was what the hiring Organization required. And, if the candidate was smart enough to answer the questions in Oracle, getting through was easy. Another common area of “faking” resumes is manipulating the duration the person has worked in an organization. Candidates, when appearing for a job interview fear justifying a break in their career. In India organizations are not very open to accepting candidates who exited their earlier job because they were asked to leave, especially candidates at junior levels. In order to avoid embarrassment of being questioned at length on the gap in service, people adopt to forging their relieving letters. With logos of companies easily extractable from the internet and scanning signatures of the person who signed their relieving letters, it is easy to use technology to recreate a new letter with revised dates to cover up any gap. The easiest excuse when they produce a copy of such letters is that the original was lost. How do organizations ensure that such falsification is detected on time, before any damage is done to their organization or their clients? The best option organizations have and is followed by most of them today is to rely on reference checks and background checks. There are a lot of organizations that do background checks for a fee. Background checks are considered as an investment in the interest of your company. One needs to know that the person being hired can be trusted. Finding out what kind of a person one is hiring and whether or not they have something in their background that negatively impacts their reputation and the financial well being or the safety of other employees in the Organization is a step towards ensuring protection of one’s asset. There are various types of pre-employment checks that can be conducted and the Organization should choose from them depending upon the kind of business they are in. The following are some of the checks that need to be conducted before hiring a person: * Checking of criminal records * Checking of Credit reports * Checking of Education records * Checking of Past employment records In fact, one of my colleagues was asking how a person who had been booked for a traffic offense be looked at if the background check threw this up. Well, if it is a one off incident, I guess it should just be ignored but if the traffic offense is indeed repeated a little too often, that is an indication that the person has little or no respect for the legal system. In spite of Organizations following such stringent processes, people still fudge or fake resumes, produce fake education certificates or job experience reports. In fact some institutions thrive on giving you fake degrees and fake experience certificates. This can only stop, if all Organizations realize the importance of background checks and get them diligently done prior to hiring a person. It is also very important for the Organization to partner with a reliable company that does these checks stringently. Organizations should be open to looking at candidates who have a break in their career or candidates who have got laid off due to reasons beyond their control such as recession or down-sizing. Similarly candidates who have a noticeable gap between completion of their education and their first jobs should also be given an opportunity. This might bring down fudging of records and documents to a certain extent. But at the end of the day what matters most is awareness about the need of thorough background checks and stringent adherence to the checks while hiring. The author is Vice President & Managing Director, Yodlee India