Excerpts from Times Ascent Online, March, 2007

Need of the hour: Pre-employment checks
Gajanan Khergamker

Just as there is always two sides to a coin similarly there is always a downside to each seemingly positive opportunity. So is true for the visible ‘boom’ in the employment sector. There are associated pitfalls that have now begun to dawn upon most companies. Interestingly, domestic companies are now realizing the need for pre-employment checks. Till about the turn of the millennium, Indian firms were unaware of the pre-employment screening business.

“In the year 2001, when I employed a senior graphic designer for my office in South Mumbai, I went strictly by her resume, little realizing that anyone would go to the extent of faking it,” recalls architect and interior designer Ms Bina Mehrotra.

When, till six months later, the designer's papers endorsing her claim of having completed a degree course from a reputed college didn't arrive, Bina smelt a rat. “It was only on finally confronting her with an ultimatum that she relented and confessed to having lied on her resume,” recalls Bina. “Apparently, she had only done a diploma course from some unheard-of institution,” maintains Bina who went on to sack her.

The need to check and countercheck a potential employee's credentials is felt the hardest today. Companies in just about every sector are feeling the pinch of trained & skilled manpower shortage, subsequently rushing into recruitments and then committing the faux pas of employing frauds who blatantly manipulate their resumes.

First Advantage Private Limited, the largest provider of screening services in the Asian region and the only organization that is solely focuses on screening runs comprehensive screening programs for over 500 clients in the region. “Today, there's a definite increase in the tendency to misrepresent personal and career information. Every one in six applications, we check involves some kind of false information. Regular checks ensure reputation risks are mitigated,” says First Advantage Private Limited Managing Director (West Asia) Ashish Dehade. The company is a global risk mitigation and employment screening firm.

“We do a little more than a million checks per year only in India and have found that one in six persons investigated have misrepresented facts,” says Mr Dehade. “Many a time misrepresentations are with regard to earlier jobs held for shorter periods of time which just are not mentioned on the resume but are very important for the employer,” adds the MD. “The checks help ascertain the authenticity of the claims of candidates which could well be highly misrepresented in certain cases,” he adds. At First Advantage, an application check make take a day to a couple of weeks depending on the number of checks that need to be carried out for an individual case.