Employment Verification – An appeal to HR professionals

	Those of you who are HR professionals may be wondering about the title of this blog post. Yes, it is an appeal to you for helping the third party background verification agencies by providing timely input for employment background checks. Used for verifying the previous employments of a candidate, these checks are very heavily dependent upon the cooperation and support from HR team members of earlier and sometimes even current employers.
The interesting part is that in the case of employment background checks, the HR professionals are the consumers as well as suppliers of the information. Let me elaborate. While the hiring company’s HR will be the consumer of this employment verification report, the HR of the earlier company will be the supplier of the verified information. So general logic would imply that the HR professionals will understand the importance and criticality of such checks and help facilitate them in an expedited manner.
But the reality is that HR professionals are generally quite busy and such third party requests for verification of ex-employee work experience tend to sink to the bottom of their check lists. Naturally, this leads to employment checks running over Turn-Around Time (TAT) and sometimes not getting completed at all. After repeated attempts over phone and email, eventually the third party verification agency has to give up on direct confirmation from the HR and has to use other proxy verification methods like trying to reach reporting managers, peers and subordinates. This is not the most optimal or reliable way to conduct employment checks.
One more point needs to be highlighted here. There are certain organizations that do employment verifications as a part of their employee background checks but who DO NOT provide any information when such requests are sent to them. This goes against the principle of reciprocity and poses a very big challenge for verification agencies as well as new employers. Such organizations need to review and loosen their policies (at the least they could just confirm the work experience if no other details can be shared).
So that is the appeal to HR professionals. Please help other HR professionals who are consumers of such employment verification reports, by providing work experience information to the extent the company policies allow. What do you think of this request?

Social Media for Background Checks – Rights and Wrongs

	Recently I have been reading a lot about the controversies around practices of many employers, mostly in US, UK and other developed economies, occasionally also in India, to ask the potential candidates for their account passwords on Facebook and other social networks. This post will cover my thoughts on this topic and will also explore how social media background checks can be done in lawful, ethical and fair manner.
Asking candidates for passwords to their social media accounts is already under investigation in USA and has been warned against in UK. It is just a matter of time before strict legislation is brought in place to prevent such mal-practices. Other countries are bound to follow suit and hopefully India too will put in place right laws to prevent these. This is great news as snooping into private and personal sections of the social media profiles is pretty much a gross invasion of privacy and a severely unethical practice.
While such practices are best curbed, the fact does remain that the web still offers a plethora of publicly available information which can help employers in learning more about the candidates and making well informed decisions, which take into account more comprehensive view of a candidate’s capabilities, beyond the typical resume. This public information could encompass candidate’s LinkedIn profile, blogs and posts authored, other public sections of their social media profiles, their tweets, and other such references. A comprehensive review of this public data can definitely enrich the evaluation and lead to more informed decisions on the candidates. The Social Media Scan offering from JantaKhoj aims to leverage the publicly available information in an ethical and fair manner, providing more details to the recruiters, and letting them take more informed decisions in the area of employee background checks.
What do you think? What is your take on using social media for background checks?

Background Checks for Work Experience Outside of Industry

Recently I saw a question from an HR professional in one of the popular HR forums – whether background checks should be done to verify the work experience of a candidate coming from a teaching / academic environment. This can be expanded to cover other spheres outside of the private or for-profit industry including government, NGOs, research institutes and even religious and cultural institutions.

I think that the doubt stems from the fact that some of these non-private industry entities may not be doing background verification on their current employees and also it may be tough to get employment verifications done from them. So it may be an easy way out just to assume that the claimed employment is correct and to NOT do any further verification.

This assumption represents a very serious breach in the organizational policy for background checks. These checks should be applied uniformly across any type of work experience. In fact, it is even more important to undertake stringent work experience checks when a candidate DOES NOT belong to private or for-profit industry. Some of the more intelligent and crafty candidates may claim employment in such domains because they know that it is quite tough to get formal verifications from such organizations.

So the best practice would be to apply the same rigor for employment background checks across any sector or domain and to let the specialists in a professional background verification agency to do the job for you.

Background Verification versus Detective Type Investigation

This post will try to clear the doubts which our clients (especially the individuals) may have about background verification and detective type investigation. We see that to quite a few consumers, these two appear to be same – especially in the context of matrimonial verification. In certain cases, even some of the business clients may mistake these to be same and request us to do detective or investigative work – typically to find out more about the absconding employees.

Background verification refers to verification of the various credentials associated with the candidates/individuals under consideration. These would include facts that are claimed by the candidates regarding their ID, contact details including residence, education, employment, reference, or criminal records. The background verification process would try to find out if these claimed credentials are true or not. In certain cases, additional feedback or observations around the character or personality attributes of the candidates may come out but these are not per se the core information being desired. The core remains the verification of the credentials provided by candidates. And in nearly all these cases, this is done with the authorization from and consent of the candidate.

Detective type investigation goes one step beyond the background verification. It aims to find out more facts, which may not have been supplied by the candidates. Depending upon the client’s requirement, it may include other activities like shadowing the candidates for a period of few days to weeks to establish behaviours, habits, social (or even anti-social!) interactions, character assessment, past and present relationships and the nature of these relationships. It is typically done in a clandestine manner so that the candidate is not aware that such gathering of facts is being done. Thus the consent or authorization of the candidate is not applicable as that may defeat the very purpose of investigation.

Background verification services provided by JantaKhoj and other such professional background verification agencies are limited to verification only and do not go within the realm of detective type investigation work. So depending upon the specific requirement, clients should either go to such background verification agencies or to detective / investigative agencies.

Do contractors including guards, drivers require background checks?

Today, in most of the medium to large sized offices in India, a large number of contractors are engaged to ensure smooth running of operations. These include housekeeping, security guards, drivers, maintenance workers, and even quite a few white collar workers. The question which some of our prospects ask is whether it is important to make these contractors undergo employee background checks.

While it is important to have all the employees undergo background verification process, it is even more important to have the non-employees or contractors undergo these checks. It cannot be assumed that the contract employee provider or temporary staffing agency would have done exhaustive background checks on these contractors, the reason being that the vendors are operating on slim margins and the extensive background checks would just add further to their costs. Additionally, there is a conflict of interest for the vendors because if something negative turns up in the background checks, they tend to lose out on the placement of that candidate.

There have been quite a few criminal episodes in which drivers or security guards were directly involved as perpetrators. In light of these, it is important for the employing companies to ensure that they keep their workforce safe by having each of the contractors undergo even more stringent background checks than what their own employees undergo. If cost is becoming an issue, then at the minimum, they should conduct address and criminal verifications on these contractors as recommended in one of the earlier blogs – What to do when an employee or contractor with clean criminal record does not remain ‘clean’?

In summary, HR should ensure that all contractors and temporary employees undergo adequate background checks to ensure workplace safety and to have a genuinely qualified workforce.

What to do when an employee or contractor with clean criminal record does not remain ‘clean’?

OR why do I need address verifications when I am doing criminal record checks?

This blog post will look at the unfortunate situation which can occur for any employer – whether a business or an individual – when the employed person initially had a clean criminal record but ended up indulging in some criminal activity.

This is the reality of life. As the financial product / service disclaimers read – ‘past performance is no guarantee of the future returns’, so it is with the world of criminal background checks. A clean criminal record does NOT indicate that the person will always remain crime free. The will to indulge in criminal act can arise at any point of time – there always is the first time when a person will turn into a criminal.

So in such cases, there is no point in wondering how this could have happened as the past criminal record was clean. The best thing is to call in the police and share all the earlier reports and employee information with them. This is the point where earlier filed documents like ID proofs, address proofs and address verification reports will come in valuable. These will give a very good starting point to the police for their investigations.

And this also goes to highlight that doing just criminal checks is not sufficient. You need to save the ID, address proofs and also get address verifications done – preferably both on current and permanent addresses. This also answers the query which some of our clients (especially those who are business of providing contractors or any blue collar workers) have – they must get criminal and address verifications done, at the minimum.

Announcing Employee Background Verification Selector Tool

Quite often, we receive this query from HR professionals and business managers who are starting out with the employee background verifications – which background checks should they select?

With a view to help answer this query, we have launched a new Verification Selector Tool which allows the users to interactively enter their input and to receive recommendations for different types of background checks that may be useful for them. The tool allows selection of industry, hierarchy level of the employees being hired, and functional areas for these employees, along with a host of other criteria. Then the tool suggests various background checks (like address, criminal records, criminal database, education, employment, reference, social media).

The tool also allows the user to mail these results to their own email ids and/or to share these with JantaKhoj team if they are interested in detailed consultation.

So please give the Verification Selector Tool a spin and let us know how you find it.

Verification Agencies Ecosystem – Competition and Cooperation

This post aims to give an inside view of the industry to the customers who use employee background verification services. It will help them understand how the verification agencies compete and cooperate with each other to serve customers.

The background verification industry in India has emerged over the last decade to become a mature ecosystem with around 15-20 national and large regional players and literally hundreds of local players. India being a large country, with hundreds of cities and towns, 14000 police stations and 600 police offices, thousands of universities, it is impossible for a single player to have its own dedicated employees covering the entire nation. Relying on other verification agencies and providers to extend the geographical and logistical reach is the logical outcome.

Even the largest of the verification agency follows the outsourced model in which certain parts, if not all, of the verifications are conducted through a network of trusted partner agencies. At a certain level, the verification agencies may be competing with each other for the end user businesses, but at the implementation level, the agencies work with each other to extend their reach. For example, a large regional agency based in National Capital Region (NCR) may be in a position to manage all the verifications in the Northern region on their own or using their direct consultants. But they may enlist support of other regional agencies in Western, Southern and Eastern regions of the country. Also, they may select specific vendors for different types of verifications (viz. address, education, criminal) in each of these regions.

Using such a model would definitely mean sharing of the profits with other members down the value chain, but it will still be profitable than hiring their own employees in each and every part of the country and building the relationships that may be required for conducting educational and criminal checks. So the resulting value chain benefits customers as these lowered costs of operations lead to lower price for them.

In summary, the verification agencies ecosystem presents a very good example of ‘co-opetition’ where they cooperate and compete with each other to bring the best solution to the market.

Which One to Choose – Pre- Or Post-Employment Background Verification?

Occasionally, we receive this query from the companies which are either just about to start employee background verifications for the first time or those which are keen to get an unbiased external opinion. Like with most of the issues with background checks, the answer is driven by the unique requirements of the company, the role / functional area, the seniority, the labour pool and the industry. Here’s how some of these may be kept in consideration.

The unique requirements of the company and the experiences which they have had till now with their recruitments have a significant impact on this decision. If a company has seen too many fraudulent candidates and a fair bit of discrepancies, it will definitely be inclined to go for pre-employment background verification. This decision is perfectly all right.

If the role is a highly significant or critical one or involves a high level of seniority, then it makes sense to go in for pre-employment checks so that the possibilities of discrepancy can be done away with and the company can move forward with employment of the candidate. For certain functional areas like finance, purchase/procurement, systems security, pre-employment verification may be the way to go.

If the labour pool available in the market is known for opportunistic behaviour or for highly discrepant resumes, it may again make sense to go for in for pre-employment screening. To a certain extent, this is linked to the industry too. For example, in the real-estate, construction and infrastructure industry, pre-employment screening is pretty much the norm. Generally a higher trust industry will tend to go for post-employment background verifications.

Whichever model you choose to go ahead with, we recommend that you always take candidate authorization for the background verifications. This may require you to issue the offer letter too in most of the cases. Also, in pre-employment verification, safe-guarding the current employment of the candidate should be kept in top most consideration. That is, the process of verification should not have an adverse impact on current employment of candidate.

Please feel free to share your thoughts via the comments.

Economic Slowdown and Employee Background Verifications

As the year 2011 ends, the Indian economy does not have much to offer to make the businesses, consumers and the government happy. Interest rates have remained at high levels, currency depreciation has been brutal, inflation continues to remain high, consumers are not buying more goods and services and businesses are hedging their bets by sitting on cash. Most of the analysts are predicting a turbulent and gloomier 2012. While the predicted Mayan apocalypse of 2012 will not happen, the impact on the economy and markets will definitely not be very positive.

So what happens to the need for background verifications during such difficult phases? Many companies and HR professionals may start viewing background verifications to be an easy area to cut down on the costs. Under pressure from the finance heads and leadership, it is natural to view the cost of employee background verifications to be an overhead, which can be done away with during the tough times.

The important question is how the candidate behaviour changes during times when jobs are tough to come by. The incentive to falsify credentials is much higher when job markets are tough. There are lesser jobs, with greater number of candidates chasing them and what better way to beat the competition by adding a few more fictitious credentials here and there in the resume!

So cutting down on employee background verifications in this stage would mean taking a higher risk with candidates having potential discrepancies in their credentials. There is a higher likelihood that the great candidate whom you are just about to hire may have some skeletons lurking in their past. It is all the more important in tough job markets to do even more comprehensive background verifications. Another way to look at this – in these times, every position and new hire represents a critical investment on part of the company. So it becomes even more essential to ensure that the investment is being made on a worthy candidate.