Need for Employee Background Verification

In this overly competitive world full of young, talented job seekers and with equally large number of job opportunities available in market makes hiring the right candidates is a big challenge. Employers frequently come across cases of forgery, falsified job references, false educational certificates etc. just to grab that lucrative job offer.

Background checks are becoming an integral part of every business to get a 360o view on a candidate before employing them. And this is for a good reason for all the stakeholders in the business. Here are some of the most common things job seekers lie about:

• 46% of resumes submitted by job seekers contain some or the other false information
• 27% of job seekers give false references on a resume
• 40% of job seekers give inflated salary claims
• 21% of applicants state fraudulent degrees on their resumes

Apart from lying on the resumes, a wrong hire can also lead to a lot of distress to the organization. This is one of the primary reasons why businesses of all sizes insist on running background checks. Apart from mitigating the risk of workplace violence or employee theft, it helps avoiding larger liabilities. Here are some thought-provoking statistics to ponder upon

• It is estimated that about 80% of the workplace violence goes unreported
• Approximately 1.5 million workplace violence cases were registered during the last year in India alone
• Occupational frauds are committed by all levels of employees in an organisation. 42% were committed by employees, 38.6% by managers, and 19.3% for owners/executives.

Hence it is very important to perform thorough background checks to know whom we are trusting and engaging in our business and ensure the risk is minimized greatly.

Where to Start and What to Check?

Background check components vary based on the organisation’s nature of business they engage in and the nature of job or role. However, the most common components that gives a clarity on a candidate’s profile includes,

(a)   Educational Checks
(b)   Work History and Previous Employments
(c)   Homeland and International Criminal Records
(d)   References for validation

The other verifications also include driving license check, passport validation, previous address check, drug screening, etc.

The Current day Processes

Due to the cost, expertise and time involved in background checks, often companies outsource the background verification process to third party verification agencies or vendors. These verification agencies often have tie-ups with various regulatory authorities and other bodies to conduct background checks and have established processes in place for conducting the background check effectively with quality and standards. However, from an employer perspective it is not possible to get a collective, real-time visibility into the verification process.

Filling the Gaps

In current day scenario, there exists a huge gap in the verification process in terms of verification speed and real-time visibility. Numerous social and government agencies have make consumer data readily available for faster and efficient verification at a fraction of a cost compared to manual verification. It is possible to perform background checks in a much easier and efficient way from verification agency perspective as well as from an employer perspective, without impacting the quality of the process.

ATTEST 360 delivers a complete end-to-end background verification solution for the verification agencies as well as the companies by bringing the candidates, verification agencies, regulatory bodies as well as the company on to a single platform. The platform extensively focuses on automating time consuming background verification processes, reducing dependencies between companies and verification agencies on information exchange and bring in a ton of cost savings are each stage of background verification process.