HR Tips for Spotting a Fake

A HR manager has to browse through umpteen resumes to shortlist the ideal candidates for a given job opening. Keep an lookout on the following pointers can help an HR manager locate a resume with dubious credentials faster.

1.    Educational Qualifications: The candidate should show consistency in his educational qualifications. A large list of qualifications within a short span of time should raise a red flag. Course certificates provided should be from reputed institutions and need to verified for authenticity.
2.    Steady Professional Growth: Look for steady professional growth in the candidates resume. The resume should show a steady growth in the positions held by the candidate. Ideally the candidate should have started off an fresher and gradually moved to more senior positions.
3.    Duration of Stay: It is also important to look into the number of months or years a candidate has served in a given company or organization.
4.    Proof of Work: In most cases the candidates are required to provide a proof or atleast examples of the work that they have done in their previous jobs. These need to carefully studied as they provide an insight into the complexities the candidate can handle in his area of expertise. It can also showcase the candidates ability to think outside of the box.
5.    References: The openness of an candidate to provide references should be gleaned as a positive signal. If the candidate has mentioned his references in the resume, then the position of the reference and the mode of contact provided can ensure that the candidate is confident about his work performance in his previous or current organization.
6.    Roles and Responsibility: The roles and responsibilities need to be in synch. A candidate that is a team lead cannot boast of having taken executive level decisions. Any such discrepancy should raise an immediate red flag and the resume should be rejected outright.
7.    Expected CTC: Once the candidate passes all the above stipulations, a look into the candidates expected CTC should also taken. A candidate that has quoted a realistic expected CTC is more likely to be a long term player than a candidate that quotes above the market price.

The tips elaborated above can help an HR manager separate the chaff from the grain and ensure that only well qualified candidates are recommended to the interviewing process.

Absconding Employees – Is there any solution for this menace? Part 2

Continuing with the topic, this concluding post will look at the various solutions which have been proposed and debated in the Indian industry to manage the problem of absconding employees. Some of these have come out of the broader debate of managing risk and frauds that can arise from employees.

The debate actually started in a big way in the year 2005 when a few instances came up in which BPO employees had misused the information that was available to them for customer service purposes. Additionally, the BPO companies were quite tormented with the frequent job hopping phenomenon. This news article as posted on Nasscom site gives one of the first references around the concept of a ‘blacklist’ or ‘negative list’ of employees. While this list would have definitely served the purpose of the industry, there were apprehensions that it could be misused by the employers to wrongly ‘blacklist’ an employee and hence this idea was never implemented.

Over a period of time, this concept gave way to a nationwide database of employees working in IT and ITES sector which would be maintained by an independent third party. The major shift was the move away from the ‘blacklist’ to a complete repository of verified credentials of employees in these sectors. This news article throws more light on the emerging model. Eventually, this model was implemented in the form of the National Skills Registry. While the registry definitely helps the member companies to avoid doing background checks every time an employee changes jobs, it still does not help with the absconding employees issues, and also a vast portion of workforce is yet to come under the scope of this registry.

One possibility could be to have an open social networking type platform where both sides – the employees and the employers have a way to share their input on each other. Even now, various sites exist where employees can go ahead and post their feedback about their current or ex-employers like www.jobeehive.com, www.glassdoor.com. So in a moderated fashion, the employers would have the ability to share their input on absconding or errant employees. And in a symmetric fashion, the employee in question would have a chance to present his/her side of the case. The potential recruiters or employers could then review the input from both the sides and reach a better informed conclusion.

In the mean time, you can continue to implement the employee background verification recommendations that were given in the Part 1 of this series. Of course, the best course of action for the HR professionals and employers is to continuously keep on making their workplace even better because eventually that is the best antidote for preventing absconding employees. Closing this with a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr – “Aim for the stars and maybe you’ll reach the sky.”

Absconding Employees – Is there any solution for this menace? Part 1

If you are a Human Resource professional working in the Indian market, you would be all too familiar with the deadly menace of absconding employees. Attribute it to the booming job market, lack of professionalism or plain mercenary opportunism, there is no denying that this is one of the biggest challenges which you probably face today. And the experience is probably quite uniform across the size of the company which you may be hiring for, although the largest companies and the so called ‘best employers to work for’ may have been spared the worst of this menace. Since becoming the largest company in your industry or becoming the ‘best employer to work for’ is generally not a very feasible solution, most of us are left wondering how to beat this ‘Gone with the wind’ challenge.

The impact of absconding employees is not trivial and manifests itself in many ways:
• Sudden disruption in the business continuity for that team, group or department. The higher the abscondee in the food chain, the bigger is the disruption.
• Increased work pressure on other remaining members. For startups and small firms, this can definitely become a killer as all the members are generally already over-loaded with work.
• The entire time period – in which you discover the act of absconding, confirm it, begin re-hiring, wait out the notice period of replacement hire, on boarding, training and reaching reasonable levels of productivity – can stretch from weeks to months in some roles. All this time, energy and effort could have been unleashed in other more productive directions.
• A nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach – did this employee take confidential material, customer list details, source code, vendor list, contract copies among other with him? Agreed that even employees departing in a cordial, mutually agreed upon situation can do so, but with the absconding employee, this risk appears to be much higher.

So is there any solution for this menace?

While, there is no fool proof solution which I am aware of (If you are, please feel free to comment), a series of processes and procedures can help minimize the impact:
• Have a multi-tasked team. Let each member rotate around the roles within a team and ensure that one person can do multiple tasks with ease.
• Have a formal backup role distribution plan within every team. That is, who will do what if the primary owner of a role is out sick, travelling, not available or absconding.
• Perform periodic information security audits to ensure that your company is always ready for any information security breach that an absconding employee may perpetrate.
• Perform comprehensive employee background verifications on every employee, contractor or temporary staffer. Give special attention to employment history, continuity of jobs, potentially hidden gaps, and lack of documentation about earlier jobs. (I agree that this still does not solve the problem entirely; case in point, an absconding employee can always cite sickness, personal issue, sabbatical, temporary studies, volunteer work to hide the period of employment when they absconded. You can always insist on confirming each of these reasons.)

In the next post (Part 2), I will explore some of the other more creative and industry wide solutions which have been proposed to tackle this menace. May your good employees never abscond – amen!