Someone's checking up on you.
Aparna Krishnakumar / Business Standard - Mumbai June 1, 2005

Before you join an IT company, your past life will be probed thoroughly.
V Narayan (name changed), 30, returned from the US and applied for a job at a Fortune 500 IT company in India. With impeccable credentials, he almost landed a project leader's post.

But he had not told his future employer that he had been arrested for child molestation in the US. Narayan had assumed that the Indian company would never find this out.

But it did. It had entrusted the task of screening him to Mumbai-based background screening company Quest Research.

Narayan is not in solitary company. Nearly every candidate for an IT job here is thoroughly scrutinised before he or she is put on the rolls.

The next time you apply for a job at an IT company in India, you can be sure that your employer will check a host of issues. Did you really get that first class for your bachelor's degree? Did you write in your application that you had a year's work experience when you actually had interned for three months at some company?

Confirms Yogesh Bhura, managing director, Quest Research: "Indian companies have begun to recognise the need for a pre-employment check to counter attrition and the theft of data."

Agrees Lulu Khandeshi, assistant vice president, human resources and training, at Tracmail, the Mumbai-based business process outsourcing (BPO) company: "The information and work that we handle is of a very sensitive nature and it is imperative for a BPO like ours to have pre-employment checks in place."

What is checked

• Your general education background. Companies call up the university where you studied for your bachelor's or master's degree and check the records.
• Your professional degree or certificates. Ditto, but this relates to your MBA degree or any certificates you may have obtained. The first point that's checked is whether your university is a recognised one.
• Employment history. Companies call up all the companies you had worked for. Companies don't call the people you have given as references because these may be your friends. Instead, they call the HR department or others.
• Criminal check. Companies check with the local police station and so on.
• Address. Companies check whether you are staying at the address you mentioned in your application. They talk to your neighbours and so on.

Who checks you out

• Quest Research. Headquartered in Hong Kong, the company is run from Mumbai and Bangalore.

Pre-employment screening is not only confined to BPO companies. Every IT company worth its salt, including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Patni Computer Systems (PCS) and Electronic Data Systems (EDS), does it too (all candidates are aware when they receive their offer letter that they will be subjected to a background check).

R. K. Raghavan, advisor, security, at TCS, explains that having such verification processes in place gives clients comfort. Security professionals say that candidates for employment often submit fake degrees and incorrect work experience details.

Though no figures are available on just how big the pre-employment screening business is, a measure of this is available from the fact that companies that conduct such screening report that the business is flourishing.

Quest's Bhura recalls that when he began offering these services in 2001, pre-employment checks were completely alien to Indian companies.

Today, however, Bhura puts the number for Quest at between 10,000- 15,000 verifications a year.

Quest, which was recently acquired by the US based First Advantage Corporation, started with just five employees here but now has over 400 and has expanded to other metros.

Says John Long, chief executive officer and president of the US-based First Advantage Corporation: "Quest has the potential to earn several $100 million in sales."

According to Long, the pre employment check industry in the US is estimated to be worth around $5 billion.

Indeed, the large IT companies now spend anywhere between Rs 3,000 and Rs 6,000 per candidate, while mid size companies shell out between Rs 1,000 and Rs 2,000 per candidate - a small price to pay because the risk associated with employing a bad candidate is far higher than the money spent on preliminary checks.

Says Milind Jadhav, senior vice president, human resources, at Patni: "Pre employment checks have helped us maintain a clean employee database and assured our clients of our global practices in human resources."

Tracmail's Khandeshi says that screening has helped the company steer clear of psychologically depressed candidates who may have behavioural problems in the future.

If employee verification has caught on in India, it's also because after the 9/11 attacks in the US, the country began laying down stricter rules for Indian employees who wished to work onshore.

This in turn required companies here to submit the findings of employee verification checks. Secondly, outsourcing has resulted in clients demanding stringent procedures in terms of work and people.

Says Jay Sitaram, vice president and country manager, Lionbridge India, the IT and testing services company: "All new employees have to undergo comprehensive background checks and drug testing. This ensures that we can be confident about fulfilling the security and confidentiality requirements of our clients and assure ourselves of quality."

The company adopts a two-pronged approach to pre-employment checks: it checks references with previous employers and whether education certificates are genuine and also employs private detectives for background checks.

Some IT companies like TCS and Tracmail usually carry out some checks themselves and outsource some part of the work to screening companies.

On the other hand, others like Patni and EDS routinely outsource employee checks to professional companies. Argues Soma Jeevan, head, human resources, at EDS: "Pre-employee verifications by professional companies are better as there is no element of bias and also spares the company the hassles of dealing with many agencies."

Investigations in India can take anywhere between 4 and 15 days per candidate. That's because information on individuals is not available at one place in India, unlike in the US where the social security number can provide leads on a person.

Proper documentation is also not available. There are seven separate documents, ranging from the passport and driving licence to the ration card which identify an individual in India. Except for the passport, every document can be easily bought.

Still, not everyone believes that pre-employment checks work. In April 2005, former employees of a well known IT company were accused of stealing money from US consumers' bank accounts - and the company does resort to pre-employment checks.

But IT company job seekers have some consolation - they won't have to undergo screening every time they change jobs. The National Association for Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) has started a voluntary skills register.

Explains Sunil Mehta, vice president at Nasscom: "Employees who wish to register with us can do so and we will release their data to employers who wish to do a background check."

Nasscom president Kiran Karnik says that the register will minimise the number of times an employee has to undergo background checks every time he or she changes jobs. So while someone will be checking up on you, it will happen only once.