Background Check for Freshers

The job market is abundant with opportunities and it has become difficult to find qualified resources at reasonable costs. Many companies have resorted to maintaining a few experienced employees while hiring freshers to handle additional work loads. However there seems to be trend of undermining the importance of background check for freshers.

Freshers don’t have any professional experience to show and are primarily hired based on their educational qualifications, presentability, and their performance in the interview. The HR manager has limited information to make a ‘hire-or-not’ decision. The presence of this limited information makes it even more crucial to have a background check done for a fresher.

The benefits of a background check translate to both short and long term gains for the company. A few of these benefits have been listed below.

Short-Term Gains:

1. Education Verification: This is the most critical information for hiring a fresher. An education validation ensures that the degrees are not forged and that the fresher has necessary qualifications to be trained for the job at hand.
2. Criminal Record Check: A criminal record check would ensure that the fresher being hired would add to the HR managers efforts to maintain a safe workplace environment. A clean criminal record check will allow the HR manager to make the hiring decision with more confidence.
3. Address Check: It is always safe to ensure that the residential information provided is correct. This holds truer for companies where the freshers are being hired to work on sensitive information. Freshers are new to the corporate environment and more likely to abscond, having a verified address would help track the candidate in case some essential information needs to be retrieved.

Long-Term Gains:

1. Easy to Promote: As a fresher grows into an experienced employee, the company would be more confident in promoting a candidate that has had his credentials verified. The pre-employment verification would put the minds of HR managers at ease when making a promotion decision.
2. Easy to Sell: The Indian job market is largely service based with a lot of companies working as back office for US clients. Most of the times the client requests for a team to be provided on a temporary basis. It is also likely that the client would like to carry out a background check on their end, for the assigned members. Having already done a pre-employment background check would keep the work force provider at ease.

As listed above the advantages of conducting background checks for freshers are many. Mandating background checks for all employees would help the company weed out undeserving candidates before they become part of the interview process. The verification of all candidate provided information would provide for quicker hiring and longer retention cycle.

Background Checks and your Sales Force

It’s a no brainer that a company’s sales force is responsible for its brand image. The sales force is the first point of contact between the company and its customers and all future business depends on that first sales rep and customer interaction. A company spends quite a significant amount of time and money in training its sales force and aligning it with the company’s brand mission. For a customer his interaction is not with the company but with the sales representative that he/she is interacting with. Given the immense responsibility that a sales rep carries, it is but imperative that the sales force be diligently hired while garnering as much information as possible about the new hires educational and professional qualification and experience.

An effective background checkprovides unbiased information about the candidate’s qualification. This information can be further used to identify certain personal characteristic and can help decide the candidate’s fit in the organization. The key qualities of a sales rep are honesty, consistency and diligence. These qualities can be easily gauged via the background checkreports and the data would be more reliable as the information is unbiased and from a party other than the candidate.

A positive background checkimplies that no discrepancies are present between the information provided by the candidate and that gathered during the background checkprocess. This positive feedback can help create a high level of confidence about the candidate’s honesty. Check and verification for educational qualification will ensure that you have the right sales rep promoting the right product and who would be able to talk with the customer intelligently. A verified professional experience will provide the HR manager with the confidence that the candidate under consideration brings with him years of customer interaction experience and is astute enough to deal with varied customer demands.

The other important aspect of hiring a candidate is consistency. Sales reps are the perfect candidates for the management trainee program and usually the best candidates to groom for future leadership roles. The company spends its time and money in grooming these candidates and helping them acquire new skill sets. A look into the candidate’s professional background checkwould provide verified and exact information about the candidate’s employment duration at places of previous employment. This information, as it is verified, can be trusted to make a call on the candidate’s professional consistency and dedication towards a company.

Most of the times a detailed background checkis overlooked for the sales rep either due to large sales force size or due to the expenses incurred. However the information provided through the background checkreports will allow the HR managers to make the right hires and will put the company at ease that the right people are managing and promoting the company brand.

How much does Employee Background Verification cost?

This is the number ONE question which we get from all our potential customers. This blog post will try to answer this question in the best possible way.

The cost of the employee background verification depends primarily on:
• Types of the checks selected
• Number of each such check
• Vendor selected

Let us go through each of these to understand them better.

Types of checks selected
Employee background verification is NOT a ‘one size fits all’ solution. It is more like a buffet from which you pick and choose relevant checks. (The prices given below are NOT that of JantaKhoj specifically but of the broader industry.)

Address checks: These include a physical visit to verify the residence (either permanent or current) and depending upon the vendor and the location, the pricing can vary from Rs 150 to 500 for every address to be verified.

Employment checks: These include cross checking the employment history (including designation, tenure, salary, performance, behavioural aspects) with current and/or earlier employers. The pricing can vary from Rs 200 to Rs 400 for every employment to be verified.

Reference checks: These cover getting the feedback from referees – suggested by employee or chosen independently. The pricing can vary from Rs 100 to Rs 300 for every reference to be checked.

Education checks: These could refer to database based verification or direct verification with the educational institute (board, institute, university). The pricing can vary from Rs 400 to Rs 1000 and beyond, depending upon the mandatory university fees. Some vendors may offer verbal verification (without any documentary proof) which will generally be cheaper.

Criminal checks (Police Station/Office): These are verifications done with local police station or office to ascertain if any criminal references exist against the candidate. The pricing can vary from Rs 400 to Rs 1000 and will typically cover the verification/certification charges levied by police (which vary from state to state).

Caveat: the prices above are for domestic checks. International checks will typically tend to be more expensive.

To keep the blog short, I will skip other specific checks like criminal database checks, drug screening, credit history, Social Media Scan.

Number of each check selected
Depending upon your specific requirements, you may opt for multiple checks of each type – for example, checking last three employers, checking all residences in last three years, checking all educational credentials from Class X up to Doctorate level. Typically you will be paying the price per check mentioned above multiplied by the number of checks, except in cases where the vendor may be able to offer a bundled price.

Vendor selected
Background verifications market is a competitive one and you can select your vendor right from the local single person shop to regional biggies on to national leaders. Typically the prices will tend to go higher as you move from local to regional to national level players. Caveat: this is a generalization and you will definitely find exceptions.

I hope that by now you have a better idea of what you may end up paying for employee background verifications. Do share your comments and feedback.

Five Ways for Spoiling your Background Check

More than often we are unaware of the repercussions our professional actions tend to have on our future prospects. Certain actions in the pursuit of a new job leave a dent on the information returned during a background check. The following five actions or inactions are a sure shot way of failing your background check and losing out on that life changing job.

1. Discrepancies between Real World and Online Information – This one is a classic in this tech driven age. With more and more HR managers turning to the web for researching on job candidates, it becomes important to maintain and align your online information with that on your resume. Avoid making lofty claims online – what could be a show off one-upmanship can translate to a bad impression on the HR manager.

2. Educational Verification – Never ever forge or lie about your educational qualifications. Almost all educational institutes provide for verification of the certificates and marksheets. The same applies to diploma or other specialized courses.

3. Professional Verification – Lying about your past professional experience is a perfect recipe for failing the background check. No matter how small the company that you have listed it is just a matter of a phone call for the background check company to verify your claims. A professional check can also mean the background verification rechecking on the company listed if the information gathered first time around was not up to satisfaction.

4. References – Do not fake your references. The background verification company usually go the extra step and may call up other employees from your existing or previous company to get more insight into your performance.

5. Current CTC – This is a part where most of the candidates tend to lie. Remember this is the most transparent aspect of any verification process. The HR managers have a ballpark estimate of the pay packages in their industry, any inflated claims about your current CTC can lead to suspicion. The previous pay slip has become a mandate of sorts in deciding the new pay package.

Technology has made  information transparent and easy to access. More and more recruiting agencies and companies are co-operating with each other to help access and choose the right candidate. The secret sauce to professional success would be to plan your career right, give it your best and to maintain a high level of honesty and integrity.