Employee Background Verifications are fast becoming a mandatory requirement for hiring new employees. Employers are no longer willing to rely on pure instincts to make a hire and often analyze a candidate’s background check report before taking a hire or not decision. The reliance, by the employer, on the employee background verification report has created a new dynamics between the employer and the employee. It has become eminent that the job seeker needs to maintain a well defined career path from the start. The career choices, duration of each job, employee qualification, conduct at work places, etc. have all become elements that are scored upon in the employee background verification report card.
The reliance of the employer on the background verification reports provides the employers with information that the job seekers presumes has been lost in the bygone years. With the employee background verification report the employee has an upper hand during the interview process. Not only does the employer have access to the information that the job seeker has provided but also can retrieve information via the background check report. This dual access to information allows the employer to segregate the real from the fake.
The candidate on the other hand has nothing to fear if the information provided by him is accurate and backed with sufficient evidence. Information that was genuinely forgotten may crop up, an valid reply to such query would help absolve any seeds of doubt that may grow in the employers mind. Then again employees need to realize that the background verification check is a peek into their previous work history; a short stint in company due to unfriendly work environment does not impede the possibility of a bright future.
The employee background verification check provides a win-win situation for both the employer and the employee. It helps weed out candidates that have fake work or educational experience thereby providing more opportunities to the deserving ones. On the other hand it allows the employer to make hires that are in his company’s best interest. The employee background verification report is thus weaving employer-employee dynamics that is beneficial for the parties.
In 2011, the effect of the US economy crash was felt in India in terms of job loss, decreased projects and more importantly the clamour of oversees clients to get more ROI from their Indian service provider. The wavering job market provided the employee verification industry with a unique opportunity to showcase its importance in the Indian market. The Employee Background Verification services have since made great in roads in providing fast and accurate information to help companies assess candidates during the pre and post hiring process.
There were obvious apprehensions about the success of the Employee Background Verification service in India, given the lack of a centralized database for background screening. However this major hurdle bas been overcome by the background verification industry by creating localized networks to check on the candidates educational and employment details. The Internet has also helped in analyzing, detailing and verifying candidate information. Candidate information collected from both the offline and online venues is merged, validated and the final verdict sent across to the requesting companies. The employee background verification service has become a HR manager’s advisor and guide. The information provided via the background verification service helps the HR manager get a transparent and unbiased view into the candidates past, and thus helping the HR manager make a confident hiring decision.
The application of the employee background verification services not only helped in hiring new deserving candidates but also helped retain valuable employees through an ongoing post-employment verification process. The post employment verification process provides the company updates about its employees new achievements, both educational and/or social. Access to this information can help the HR manager develop a better understanding about the employee requirements and help retain the employee by addressing the employee requirements within the company.
2011 was a year of recognition and acceptance of the background verification services in India. The service proved its potential as an important HR tool. This service industry continues to evolve and is gaining acceptance from a plethora of new industries. All companies that follow a background check policy have experienced undisputable short and long terms benefits. If you are a company that has yet to set up a employee background process then call us @ +91 40 42007092 today and we will tell you how you can have a more profitable and productive 2012.
I would understand if the readers of this article think that the title of the article ‘ Employee Background Checks and their Socio Economical Impact’ is a little too far-fetched. Let me explain my reason for why I believe that a stringent and mandatory employee background check can have far reaching affects on the social and economic conditions of the country.
First let’s understand what an employee background check entails. Background checks typically include the following verifications:
- Professional Verification
- Educational Verification
- Address Verification
- Criminal Record Verification
Now for a moment let’s assume that the need to carry out a detailed background check, by the hiring company, was a law in India. Would the mandate for a background check change the job seekers approach towards the job? Would it require the job seeker to be more honest and transparent? The answers to the above questions lie in the depths of human psychology. A large pool of the population wants to be law abiding and in the process leads a stress free life, free from the fear of getting caught. As per mass consensus, any requirement that is not a law is open to self interpretation or can be tweaked to suit one’s needs. Implementation of a law translates to a case of imposing honest by making dishonesty punishable.
Employee background check is one of the few checks that take into consideration multiple aspects of the candidate’s life into picture. It’s not a check for a given instance of the candidate’s life rather it spans over multiple years, taking into account the candidate’s educational and professional history, while being refreshingly current. Now if the employee background check was the law or for that matter a mandate in all companies, big or small, then it would push the candidates to be more focused on studies, as forging educational certificates would be a big risk. It would require the candidates to choose their career paths more carefully, apply themselves more honestly to their work and to be more honest about other aspects of the background check.
Not all people will be honest – there will always be a few that will try to game the system; the emphasis here is on having a large set of the population to follow the system. A study in comparison would be the mandatory military service law in Israel. In spite of this law not all Israelis would be disciplined but I am sure a large majority are. From a social aspect a strictly implemented employee background check process would result in a more transparent and honest society.
The economic gains from the above suggestions are a natural outcome. A country where the employee background check process is a law is a haven for all businesses, big or small. It’s a fact that companies that conduct stringent background checks have a higher retention rate and the employee background check being a law would put also put pressure on the job seeker to be honest.
Mandating a stringent employee background check will definitely create an positive impact on both the social and economical growth of the country. It will allow distribution of jobs to the most deserving candidate, curb falsification of educational or professional documents, and provide a win-win situation not just for the employee but also for the employers.
The employee attrition rate in India is at an all time high. The Hewitt Associates’ annual Asia Pacific Salary Increase survey for 2009-10 pegs the turnover rate in India at 13.8 per cent. This high employee turnover rate results in both direct and indirect losses to a company and causes continued and unwarranted pressure on the HR department. I believe that given the current job opportunities the attrition rates would continue to see an upward trend in the near future.
Before we discuss a solution for this problem it is important to understand the causes leading to employee defection. Most of the causes revolve around the level of satisfaction the job provides to the employee. Job satisfaction can be a factor of salary provided, level of workload, opportunity for growth, level of skill competency and level of job security.
I would assume compensation as being the most important factor for employee defection. Resolving job compensation issue can be a tricky situation wherein a consensus needs to be reached between what the company is willing to pay and the employees’ perceived value of him. However either of the attrition factors cannot be held in isolation. It is always a combined effect, for example if a company invests in improving employee skills then a progressive employee may not mind a lower salary. On the other hand, low job compensation coupled with excess work hours and no opportunity for growth is a sure shot recipe for losing the employee.
One more not so obvious reason leading to employee defection is the lack of job skills. Most employees exaggerate their competence for a given sill set. This allows the candidate to be hired, however as the work load begins to mount and deadlines are set, there develops a fear of getting fired. Rather than get in a situation where his/her skill sets are questioned the employee begins to seek alternate job opportunities and defects ASAP.
Most of the HR manager may be aware of the above causes of employee attrition and may also have the necessary steps in place to prevent the same. However the implementation of a thorough employee background check during the hiring process can provide insight into the candidate’s professional background and personality.
The valuable information provided by a thorough background check arms the HR manager with the information for making critical hiring decisions and allows filtering of candidates that are a mismatch to the organizational culture.
Most of the times companies hire new talent with all the necessary precautions. This entails a thorough interview process, a hard-to-crack written exam and a detailed background check. Only when the candidate meets the company’s stringent standards, is he made part of the workforce. However once the candidate is onboard there is little done in terms of ongoing background checks. There have been many cases where a candidate having passed the pre-employment background check was hired, but later lead to having caused irreparable damage to the company’s exchequers, brand and/or its employees.
The point to keep in mind is that human character is ever evolving and a person’s interaction with his circumstances continues to define/redefine who he becomes. Human psychological evolvement can be either positive or negative; it is not possible to accurately predict outcomes of these psychological changes. However the responsibility of being aware of any negative outwardly action (recorded or reported) performed by the employee, lies squarely on the HR managers shoulders. Carrying out regular post employment background checks holds many long term benefits for the company a few of which have been listed below:
- The awareness of a post employment background check being carried out on a regular basis helps keeps the employees alert and puts an additional pressure on them to check themselves from carrying out any acts of misdemeanour, both in and out of the office.
- An ongoing employee background check keeps the HR manager updated of any new criminal record filed against the employee. Required action based on the severity of the crime can then be taken by the HR manager.
- A change of address that the employee failed to report can easily be tracked and the employee can be asked to submit the new residential information. Having an updated employee address record is especially important for companies that work on client sensitive information.
- More than often, employees fake educational qualifications to get a higher pay raise, during the appraisal process. An educational background check can help the company validate the educational qualifications and allow the company to make the required pay raise.
Having a process of check and balances helps weed out unwanted elements from the company’s workforce effectively. The cost associated with ongoing employee background checks are minimal to the benefits the company can reap from having the most ideal candidate for a required position.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
India with its large pool of qualified work pool has become the premier outsourcing destination. In the start the outsourcing model presented a unique opportunity with large profit margins. However the large profit margins attracted more players and soon the profit margins began to dwindle. The outsourcing business model in India has come to the point where all extraneous expenses have to be bled out to ensure a decent profit. Most companies in an effort to offset increasing expenses, try to maintain a low paid staff.
The low paid employee model may perceive the employee verification process a wasted effort for the following reasons:
- The focus is on finding low paid employees that meet minimal hiring qualifications
- There already exists a likely tendency to overlook obvious discrepancies in the resume
- Employee verification is considered as a unwarranted cost.
There seem to be obvious pit falls in the “save as much as possible through anyways possible” business ideology. First off the market awareness that a company does not conduct background checks is more likely to attract candidates that have something to hide or carry falsified educational or professional information. Such candidates if hired may provide less than optimal output, which overtly results in other employees having to contribute more and leads to faster employee burnout and dissatisfaction.
The hiring of an unverified employee may result in creation of a vicious fast-hiring-fast-firing circle leading to higher employee turnover. A high employee turnover not only has monetary implications but also results in dampening the morale of other employees.
If hiring a low cost workforce is your business model then so be it, low cost does not default to low quality, however a quality check in terms of a thorough employee background verification can ensure that you get the most bang for your buck. The advantages of employee verification are many but the key benefits would be as follows:
- Statistically, employees that are hired after a thorough background check are likely to stick around longer.
- Lower employee turnover implies more stability, less loss of knowledge base and more profits.
- New hires perceive the presence of large number of long term employees as a positive aspect about the company
It is said that for the need of a nail…the war was lost, is this scenario true for your business? Think long term, act now and win the battle of the profits.
So the struggle for implementing a non-government centric Lokpal bill is in full swing. The struggle itself is an epitome for the need for transparency not only on part of individuals but also on the part of different government entities. This struggle is redefining the Indian mindset and holds valuable nuggets of information that can be integrated as part of an individual or corporate growth.
In principle a background check is needed to validate the candidate’s integrity. Integrity in terms of being able to truthfully declare educational, professional qualifications, presenting valid residential information and essentially being responsible for the actions that lead to the candidate’s current level of qualification. Also it’s imperative that the candidate should ‘under promise and over deliver’ as any inconsistency in the promises made during the background check can have adverse effects. Drawing direct parallels is the failure of Baba Ramdevji in being able to fire the nation’s imagination towards his cause. The cause though noble was smeared by evidence of secret pacts with the reigning government and a lack of transparency in the Baba’s and his aide’s background. The opaque background left Baba Ramdevji open to government attacks and for the lack of better information most of his followers became his critics.
Corporate identity is defined by the company’s employees. Both employees and companies are two ends of the same spectrum. A lack of check by companies on its hires can spell doom for the company’s progress and possibly image. The most recent example is Danish Riyaz, who was arrested by the police for involvement in the July 13 Mumbai blast and was working in an IT firm in Hyderabad. A direct comparison to the Jan Lokpal struggle would be the utter failure of the reigning government to keep a check on its party members. The involvement of its party member in umpteen cases of money siphoning has not only led to its image getting tainted but also presents a bleak future for the party’s evolution.
In many of the previous blog articles I had discussed the need for thorough background checks for individuals joining political parties. However as usual we continue to hire and believe people either due to their supposedly spectacular lineage or at face value.
It’s time to say JAGO CORPORATES JAGO…conducting background checks allows companies to hire and retain employees for a longer span of time. This means lesser losses in terms of employee attrition. Less loses to the company equals more investment by the company equals more employment equals a happier India.
Think…Process and Implement.
Background Verifications | Manish | 
January 30, 2012 7:07 am | 
Comments (0) 
Subscribe