Moment of Truth – What to do when everything’s perfect except one ex-employer’s feedback

Background verification has become inevitable. But what if an employee’s background check fails?
Moment of truth - Post Background Verification
Let’s consider one such situation where an employee has an excellent track record and is a gem for the company and will add the medals of clients in long run. Only problem with his joining is his background verification result.

The result says that this employee has worked in two companies till now, let’s say X and Y. Some eight years back, this employee started his career with company X and broke the company’s employment bond. As a result, he didn’t receive a valid company leaving certificate. The information collected from X’s HR department indicates that this employee is absconding from the work and there is no mention of the last working day or date.

Remaining seven years of work in company Y was outstanding. He has been an ace employee and he has all the documents in place. Apart from the above mentioned problem, there are no legal, criminal or any other issues that are of concern with this employee.

Question is – with an absconding tag from his first company and outstanding employee tag from the next, is it fine for this new company to continue with his employment? What can we, the decision-making HR professionals, do when we face the moment of truth?

In my view, there are few possible solutions to this problem –

1. Termination of the employee on grounds of not submitting all the documents mentioned.

2. Compromising with the situation and hence counting only the years of service in company Y and  adjusting the years of service and salary accordingly in agreement with the employee.

3. Asking the employee to resign on his own.

Whatever be the solution, win-win, win-lose or lose-lose, situation is challenging for the HR personnel who have to deal with it. There might be other feasible solutions as well. Or can we just overlook such issues? What’s your say? Let all of us know!!

3 Comments

  1. In my point of view if an employee is doing really well in his current company;Termination wont be a solution…it will be better option that he should be counting only the years of service in Y.with an adjustment of service & salary.

  2. I also believe the same. HR should consider employee’s outstanding performance. There is a possibility that employee had absconded from his last job because of some unavoidable situation.

  3. One thing to focus on here is that the earlier company had an ’employment bond’. The status of such bonds is always suspect and they appear to be highly restrictive and go against the very nature of the free market economics.
    In my first job, I too had to sign such a bond for a duration of two year or so – the flimsy reason given was that the company was investing heavily in training the freshers. And if you were sent overseas, you had to serve for one more year at the home base after coming back!

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