Online Sherlock identifies fudged resumes, a boon for

Nikita Peer

You’re sitting across the table in the conference room with a prospective employer who is likely to offer you your dream job. And one thing separating you from the recruitment panel – is your CV. It looks Impressive. Its loaded. Its apt for the job you have applied. However, there’s one tiny problem. You have fudged an achievement on that paper.

Can you get away with it?

Not any longer. Mumbai-based start-up IDfy.com, an online Sherlock has been founded to actually ‘verify your personal story’. In other words, IDfy conducts a background check to verify your credentials. The start-up’s clients could include anyone who needs to assess your track record, from prospective employers, to a dating service, a bank where you’ve applied for a loan, flat-owners renting out premises, to even the selection committees handing out of awards.

Creating Credible Profiles

IDfy was founded by Vineet Jawa, Ashok Hariharan and Hatim Bahrenwala in 2011 with a seed capital of Rs 20 lakh that was spent on building the technology and launching a pilot. The company has since gone beyond conducting background verification to inviting users to create a ‘credible’ profile on the portal with a facility to upload documents to back up their claims. If you have nothing to hide, why not create a professional and, more importantly, credible profile?

But doesn’t LinkedIn already do that? “Think about it, how hard is it to create a LinkedIn profile with false information? Is someone going to verify it for you? Not really. LinkedIn is not enough,” says the IDfy team, very emphatically, on their blog.

The bitter truth is that 40 per cent of people lie on their resumes and harried recruiters take an average 6 seconds to scan a resume. Hiring the right people is definitely a nightmare, Bahrenwala points out.

He adds that for companies hiring more than 200 people a month, managing resume verification can be very tedious, involving a mammoth number of excel sheets and emails. IDfy, on the other hand, empowers clients with a user-friendly dial code and a system to manage these verifications. No more paperwork!

Building A Trust Platform

“The velocity of our interactions online has increased in the last 10 years. Today, we do a lot of things on a daily basis. The technology solutions of IDfy identify all these interactions and aggregate them into one single platform. So, if you want someone to know these details, you only need to give them your IDfy number, which is linked to your IDfy profile. They will get to know about what you have done and what people (colleagues, bosses or friends) think about you through surveys you may conduct on the site,” explains Baheranwala.

“If you are a well-travelled person, we can pull information about your travel experiences which you have shared on, say, Trip Advisor. We can also pull all your thoughts from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You are thus offering slightly more information about yourself before turning up for an interview,” he explains.

Also, when creating an individual profile, is concerned, the user completely controls his or her identity and only shares whatever they want to. Alternatively, they can turn it completely public. The difference between IDfy and other portals with online profiles, such as social and professional networking platforms and matrimonial sites, is that the former adds a layer of credibility to the information shared.

Revenue Model

For individual consumers, features like creating an online profile, getting colleagues and friends to vouch for you and creating surveys is free. Document verification and reference check is a paid service. The verification of an entire resume costs Rs 2,000. “If you look at the top ten IT recruiters in the country, they easily hire around 2,00,000 people a month and so the market is huge for us,” Bahrenwala points out.

On the enterprise side, verifying past employment details, educational qualifications, address, reference checks, PAN details, international database checks, criminal record and substance abuse costs up to Rs 3,000 per person.

The Growth Story

From starting out as a platform to merely verify documents to running the entire gamut of background checks and offering individuals an opportunity to add credibility to their profiles, IDfy has come a long way. Today, the company has 15 clients including some big names like Indian School of Business, Toboc and oncontract.com, and 1,800 individual consumers.

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