Naveen Chugh, a 34-year-old financial services professional, was eyeing a plum job at a global investment bank. To spruce up his resume, Chugh added a one-year certificate programme as an additional qualification. His prospective employer was, however, quick to spot that he had not done any such course. The application was rejected, and the HR firm was sounded off.
Human resource firms are now facing the heat when it comes to inaccuracies in the candidate CVs. To counter the criticism, the HR industry is in the process of creating a blacklist that will have details of all minor and major discrepancies in the candidate’s resume.
The industry as a whole is working on collating this data, and the list could be completed by June 2020. There will also be scores assigned to candidates based on their CV discrepancies. This would be high to low depending on the type of inaccuracy.
Data shows that employment-related data is the most misrepresented by candidates. Background verification firm AuthBridge, in its annual trend report, said that the most common reasons for discrepancies in employment verification were incorrect tenure (22 percent) and fake/forged documents (12 percent).
How will it work?
For instance, in the case of Chugh, the details have already been stored by the recruitment firm that referred him for the position. So, whenever he applies for a job next year, these details will throw up for any potential recruiter.
There would be a segregation of major and minor discrepancies in the CV. Here, educational qualifications, criminal records and past employers’ details would be a part of the major discrepancy list. Others like residential address and tenure of employment could be the minor ones.
These discrepancies would add up to a score similar to the credit score.
“There are cases where a candidate makes a genuine mistake like understating or overstating their exact tenure in a company by a few months. This could be an acceptable error compared to a situation where an individual has purposely lied about working in an organisation” said the chief executive officer of a mid-sized recruitment consultancy firm.
So, whenever a new job is advertised and a candidate applies for the position, the detail of their CVs and any past discrepancy are disclosed to the company. Whether the company chooses to hire the candidate or not is its choice.
Why background verification?
Companies are increasingly taking the help of background verification firms because of a larger presence in international markets and a higher number of foreign investors.
Global investors are particularly focused on engaging with only the Indian firms that have a high level of corporate governance. Of this, having employees with a clean background is a crucial factor. During mergers and acquisitions, some firms also do a re-screening to ensure that the background records are up to the mark.
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