Top Concerns of Candidates Due to Background Verification.
October 10th, 2022
Many employers will agree that they had the experience of hiring a candidate who looked perfect on paper, but after hiring underperformed in his/her role or was exposed for lying in the resume. To avoid hiring such candidates, employers today are becoming cautious about who they are hiring and choosing digital background verification for making the best decisions. With the help of digital background checking tools such as #Digiverifier, employers these days can find out genuine information about the candidates, this includes past employment details, salary details, whether the employee is involved in moonlighting, experience details, education details, identity checks, and more. So, the candidates who are providing fake details should know that employers can uncover their original details with a thorough background check, and their candidature can be canceled as a result.
In this blog, we have discussed what are the resume frauds that employers can come across, and how Digiverifier can reveal these frauds.
Lying about job experience
Lying about job experience is one of the most common frauds committed by candidates. Producing fake experience letters and salary slips have become easy and common for candidates, and they often use them to secure better positions in an organisation. However, with thorough digital background verification, employers can now find out the actual experience of the candidates and hire the right ones.
Here, is an incident where an employer had adopted Digiverifier to filter genuine candidates. The client conducted a walk-in interview for 20 vacant posts and wanted to recruit candidates with 4+ years of experience. Unexpectedly, 200 candidates appeared for the interview, this was huge in volume, so the employer wanted to reduce the count and find genuine candidates who all actually had4+ years of experience. Thus, he adopted Digiverifier. The tool revealed the genuine candidates instantly, and the recruiter could engage the right candidates in his hiring process and avoid a bad hire.
Lying about salary
Candidates often inflate their salaries and provide fake documents to prove the same, and this they do to get higher salaries and secure better opportunities. However, an employer just needs to choose a proper background verification process to find out the same.
A similar case of a candidate lying about salary, and claiming more than what he actually earns was revealed by Digiverifier. Here, also the employer wanted to identify genuine candidates. Digiverifier found a candidate who was actually earning 10 lakhs and was demanding 24 lakhs. Employer’s total annual salary expense here was just 7.5 lakhs.
Moonlighting
The cases of #moonlighting or dual employment are rising exponentially. This is a situation where a candidate works simultaneously with more than one organisation for financial gains and other perks. Such activities cause a breach of confidentiality, compliance, ethics, productivity issues, and other problems. To fight against such serious issues, a top organisation like Wipro recently fired 300 employees. From a legal standpoint, if an employment contract forbids moonlighting, then it is a strict no, and if any candidate engages in this activity, then he/she can be rightfully terminated.
However, are you wondering how Wipro came to know about these fraud cases, and that too in such a large volume? One of the best ways could be with the help of digital background verification tools like Digiverifier that can help to uncover such details.
For instance, here is a case where Digiverifier helped an employer instantly to expose a candidate who was moonlighting and had earned 43 Lakhs in a single month working with 23 concurrent employments in February 2022. In another case, they found a candidate moonlighting with 62 employments over a period of 6 years.
Uncovering such cases was possible with comprehensive digital background verification as Digiverifier conducts #UAN checks and uses more reliable sources than Form 16 to find out such discrepancies.
Hiding or lying about academic credentials and skill set
Candidates to get better roles in an organisation lie about their academic credentials and skill sets. And, employers who hire such candidates mistakenly, may find that they are underperforming, and are unqualified for the job roles. This is a case of a bad hire, and employers want to avoid this.
Today, with the help of tools like Digiverifier, and both digital and conventional processes, employers can find out about candidates’ real academic credentials and skill sets. In the verification process, the candidate’s educational and professional qualifications from respective universities and/or colleges are checked. Here the candidates’ names are run through both known (trusted) and unknown (fake) universities/institutes/organisations, and information only from these official sources is considered for further verification. The verification is done in three ways.
- a) Verbal verification:This verification is done verbally with the help of telephonic conversation, and here call records are maintained.
- b) Written verification: Obtained via email from the official email ID of the university/college. Also, it can be on a letterhead that is duly signed and stamped by the institute.
- c) Stamp: Here, the education document is duly signed and stamped by college authorities.
Note: The verification will be tagged as “Unable to Verify” if the verification of an education document is not received in 3 attempts.
Hiding criminal history
Unfortunately, employers may also have to deal with candidates with criminal backgrounds. Generally, since, the resumes don’t require candidates to mention their criminal past, they choose to omit it and avoid informing their employers. Such individuals can be a source of trouble for companies, and it is risky to hire them. With a thorough digital background verification, an employer can find out about a candidate’s criminal past.
For this, the employer needs to partner with a good BGV vendor and adopt tools like Digiverifier. For instance, an employer had adopted Digiverifier to find out a candidate’s background. It was found in verification that the candidate mentioned a fake employer’s name in his resume. And as a proactive measure, the team initiated a check on the e-court, and as they had suspected, it was found that the candidate had criminal charges against him. So, the employer was saved from hiring a criminal in the early stages of recruitment.
Impersonation
Many candidates use other person’s documents in place of theirs to get hired – this is termed Impersonation. Such cases can also be found by conducting proper background verification. In fact, Digiverifier through the help of reference verification made it possible to expose a client’s candidate who was impersonating. Here, a telephonic and/or email verification was procured, and from professional references provided by the candidate, details about his/her personal integrity, and professional and educational background was found. Now, for verifying freshers, their verifications are conducted with the help of details collected from their educational institutes and other reputable citizens.
Drug abuse
Emerging cases of drug abuse can be a big issue with companies. To avoid such problems, recruiters are now investing in drug tests to avoid hiring candidates using drugs and other banned substances. Digiverifier helps employers to identify such candidates with the help of testing. The tests are conducted in partnership with multiple drug screening labs at the national and international levels. These labs can conduct 10-panel drug tests.
Conclusion
Many candidates try to take shortcuts to get recruited. However, as we can see with the help of digital background verification tools like Digiverifier, employers can now get the real details about such candidates and decide the best for themselves. In the pre-and post-onboarding stages, if a candidate provides wrong details, he/she can be easily identified, and the job can be denied to him/her. Due to the rise in candidates’ resume frauds and other frauds, recruiters are increasingly becoming cautious about hiring and following best practices like investing in digital background verification with tools like Digiverifier to conduct safe recruitment drives. To know more, get in touch with us.