Hire in a hurry - repent at leisure
Call Connect - June, 2004

This is not out of a John Grisham business thriller but quite commonplace in India's ITES industry. A make or break pilot project of a key US client is staffed by a hundred people - three of them have faked their earlier employment, two don't have the technical expertise or degrees that they claim to have and another one has been deployed by a competitor to infiltrate a competing firm's systems.

As Indian ITES companies continue to ramp geometrically and hire at a furious pace with the limited HR resources within, a rapidly growing segment of resume "fakers" are leaving honest candidates behind in the race for new economy jobs.

Mention this to Indian HR managers and they are rapidly beginning to recognize this disturbing phenomenon. "Earlier we were doing employee checks only for our clients. But we realized that we need to conduct these checks within our company as well, as there could be people we were hiring whose background we were unaware of. A wrong hire proves very expensive to the company and the screening programme is a worthwhile investment" says Monica Saxena, Manager - HR, Patni Computer Systems Ltd.

"Pre 9/11, 93% of companies in the USA conducted employee screening programmes. Post 9/11, you can say that ALL of them do it now as standard practice," says Mr Scott Graham, Managing Director - Quest Research Group. Quest is the first international company to have set up shop in India. They already have six branches here - with their research center staffed by over 300 researchers in Mumbai.

Many a times, scheming candidates provide mobile numbers for their references and unsuspecting HR executives probably end up talking to the candidates' friends who shield their identities. Other common forms of resume fraud include counterfeiting letters from previous employers by creating letterheads or stealing them at the time of leaving.

Apart from bogus employment, you have non-accredited colleges offering degrees (Raja Arabic University, Nagpur and United Nations University, Delhi to name a couple) for a straightforward price without students having to agonize over exam preparations. The industry of fake degree certificates, once focused on people looking for work in the Middle East, has quickly seen this new market and police regularly seize thousands of forged certificates in a single raid. And if someone is printing them, then you can be sure that someone is buying them.

According to a survey conducted by Quest, incomplete education and fake degrees account for major discrepancies in the education checks that they carry out on subjects. When it comes to employment checks, 45.66% of the discrepancies stem from fake employment. The others include period of employment, inaccurate salary and unannounced exit.

How often have recruiting managers of BPOs and Call Centers stopped to ponder whether who they are recruiting are indeed who the person claims to be and whether they actually are what they say they are?

But there is some help at hand for overworked recruiting managers of Indian ITES companies now. Background screening companies like Quest are running intensive screening programs for almost all major BPOs in India.

The bottom line is very simple. A bad hire could cost you anywhere between 6 - 12 months of salary besides posing risks to your security, reputation and employee motivation level.

Whilst in the US the average settlement for a negligent hiring lawsuit is now in excess of $2 million, the biggest financial risk to any Indian or international company is probably the fact that now it just won't get the contract if it doesn't have an auditable process in place.

The writing on the wall is clear - if you hire in a hurry, you would have to repent at leisure.