PEEP SHOW - Fake it & you may lose your dream job

ECONOMIC RECOVERY HAS BROUGHT EMPLOYERS BACK TO THE HIRING ZONE, BUT IT’S NOT EMPLOYEES’ MARKET YET Cos Step Up Background Checks Of Prospective Employees’ Educational & Personal Information

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As the economy rebounds and hiring begins to pick up pace, companies are going to unprecedented lengths with sweeping background checks of prospective employees. The scope of pre-employment screening, which has been traditionally limited mainly to senior executives and involved basic searches to verify the accuracy of the resume, the educational background and biographical data, is now getting vastly expanded. All job applicants, not just those at senior levels, are being scrutinised with a fine toothcomb. And almost no area is off limits.

While false claims about education and employment are among the main triggers for rejection, some job applicants have been tripped up by their personal lives. One such was denied a job after an agency specialising in background verification discovered that the individual was having an extra-marital affair. The agency asked the prospective employer, a multinational company, to put the application on hold by filing a ‘pink’ report and the employer obliged. “In our lingo, green means a goahead, pink is doubtful and red signifies rejection,” said SK Sharma, group director-HR at Premier Shield, a security solutions company that carries out background checks on behalf of corporates. A red flag can be activated by a number of other factors: criminal history, substance abuse, a poor credit track record or even dodgy equity trading. While former colleagues, classmates and those living in the applicant’s neighborhood are tapped for information, some agencies go even further.

Premier Shield admits to setting up sting operations to test for ethics and some companies infiltrate staff into the organization where the applicant is working to gather information about the prospective employee’s conduct with colleagues, especially women.

Arun Bhagat, vice-president, HR, with infrastructure group GMR said he visits colleges and universities and at least two past employers to do reference checks of candidates. It recently sacked an employee just days after he joined after it was discovered that he had falsified some documents. “For key roles in finance and at executive levels, we make discreet enquiries on the reliability of the professional, his reputation in and outside the organization and even carry out a search on the internet,” he said. Mr Bhagat insists that the checks are carried out with the consent of the prospective employee. Software and back-office service providers were among the first to make background checks mandatory for all potential hires. Many IT companies and HR consultants like Ma Foi engage firms such as First Advantage, PP Verify, PremierShield, Onicra, Authbridge for pre-employment screening, which can cost between Rs 1,000 and Rs 5,000 per employee.

Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations India, a detective agency, which undertakes screening for several multinational firms, found in a recent survey for IT and IT-enabled Services providers that about 4,000 companies, universities and institutes of dubious background were providing fake documents. Pradeep Bahirwani, vice-president (talent acquisition) at Wipro said that in the IT industry the average percentage of fake resumes is 20-30%. “Based on preventive and corrective actions less than 1% of the total active applications we receive would be fake,” he added.

Among other sectors, the financial services industry, which hires an estimated 75,000 employees every year, is now actively adopting the practice started by IT companies. Battling a marked rise in the incidence of fraud by employees — a recent study by risk consultancy Kroll showed that fraud is increasing twice as fast in the financial services sector than in others — companies are snooping on potential hires more than ever before.

“This is part of the new belt-tightening system in all high-profile recruitments in the financial sector,” said veteran headhunter, Ajit Isaac, MD & CEO of Ikya Human Capital Solution.

While nearly all leading banks carry out verification with the police for criminal history, some private banks like Axis Bank have also started checking the credit history of recruits. “Since credit history is closely associated with one’s reputation, reviewing it is becoming a norm before recruitment,” a senior Axis Bank official said. The country’s largest private sector insurer ICICI Prudential Life concedes that nearly 7% of the candidates it reviewed for hiring had a fraudulent past. The company has now partnered with reputed risk management agencies to undertake background screening.

“As one of the leading players in the insurance space, we are deeply concerned about the incidence of fraud and are working with the industry to explore ways to mitigate the risk of fraudulent activities,” said ICICI Prudential Life HR head Judhajit Das. The insurance sector is now even thinking of creating a common central database that will include the names of all employees fired for fraud. The proposal, put forward by Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, is now being discussed by all leading players.

The Life Insurance Council, the grouping of life insurers, is also keen on the idea. “However, someone has to manage such a database of delinquent employees — it may either be us or the regulator IRDA,” said chairman SB Mathur. With curious employers prying deeper into the backgrounds of potential employees, there are concerns that they could intrude into individuals’ privacy. E Balaji, CEO of HR firm Ma Foi, observes that in Europe, there are stringent privacy laws and strict regulations and guidelines about how much an employer can check the background of an employee. “In comparison, awareness about privacy laws is much lower (in India). Companies just take a broad declaration from the individual about such background checks,” he said.

Reporting by Monica Behura & Mahima Puri in New Delhi and
Writankar Mukherjee, Debjoy Sengupta & Atmadip Ray in Kolkata