Backgrounds to the fore
The Hindu Business Line - January 24, 2005.

A candidate claiming to have worked with an MNC, submitted documents in support of his employment with the company. An official of the HR department of the MNC, when contacted, confirmed that the candidate had worked with the MNC but highlighted a discrepancy in the information, saying the candidate had overstated his period of employment by almost two years.

The documents submitted by the candidate were declared fake by the HR department due to the following reasons:

• Experience letters are issued by HR Departments and not by functional staff.
• This experience letter was signed by a junior colleague of the candidate and not by the functional head.

When the signatory was confronted with the documents, he admitted to having issued the letter without any authority, in order to help his friend.

The candidate was rejected and his colleague, too, lost his job for participating in a fraudulent act.

That was from the files of Quest Research, a leading background screening specialist company.

As is evident from the pie charts provided by them, discrepancies and false claims in resumes are a growing concern for companies (and good business for them!).

Says Yogesh Bhura, Managing Director ( South Asia ), Quest Research, which does about 15,000 checks a month, "Falsification is a very old practice. It is only now that professionally managed companies are paying more attention to the issue, and there is more awareness and media attention about this than ever before. This problem is rampant across all levels of hierarchy within an organisation. Those who falsify their résumé would constitute 10 to 15 per cent of the total new recruits."

Does having a background-screening programme help? Companies with background-screening programmes would see a decline in the percentage of falsification as the practice matures, says Bhura.

Is there a geographical element to this problem? Are some areas more guilty than others? Bhura says no clear geographical pattern is visible. Yet, after all that is done in terms of screening, do companies sometimes choose to overlook discrepancies because of hiring pressure? Bhura says he has not encountered such instances, saying it would defeat the purpose of the exercise. But some companies do sometimes succumb to the pressure because they need manpower. With the security environment worsening, these are, however, likely to become rare exceptions in future.