Stricter checks for new hires
One shameful incident made Arvind K., vice president HR with a leading MNC, hire a special agency for screening new candidates. The reason — an employee ended up being not only a slacker but also a corporate spy who leaked out information about a new product strategy to a competitor. And Arvind is not the only one. In order to hire genuine and truly talented candidates, many companies are now doing deeper background checks. Apart from education and the term of employment, aspects like the applicant’s Key Result Areas (KRA), team size, achievements, compensation and cyber crime record too are now under scrutiny.
Explaining the reason why employers are deploying a variety of tools to verify their antecedents, Sunil Goel, director, GlobalHunt, an executive search firm, says, “A decade ago, reference checks of candidates used to be quite basic but the past few years, it has been observed that most global and large organisations are very conscious about checking a candidate’s history. These reference checks are not just popular in MNCs but even large Indian conglomerate and mid-size organisations are opting for them as they want their businesses to be managed by reliable people.”
Most young workers today lie about their achievements, says Ritika C., HR manager with Intellicom, a Jindal Group enterprise. “We are doing stringent checks now as it has become quite common for candidates to give references of friends who they claimed were their bosses. Most of the time, people at senior levels claim that they launched a particular product or service or they came up with a great idea. On assessment, we find that they were just a part of the process for launching the product or service.”
Some firms are even hiring special security agencies, which give them detailed reports about the credentials of the interviewees. “In some companies, there are no particular performance assessment modules. So to counter this we are doing an in-depth assessment of KRAs and are also going for discreet reference checks from industry people of the prospective candidates. We have also tied up with screening agencies to find out about crime records and identity verification of the applicants,” says Ashok Bhatt, VP-HR with Pamtel Solutions.
While companies are busy putting together well-planned recruiting policies in place, these exhaustive checks seem a little too intrusive to job seekers. Nishant Gupta, a Web developer, asserts, “Although companies may benefit out of deeper checks, there are chances that these policies may hurt the sentiments of candidates whose credibility is in question for no valid reason. Firms need to exercise diplomacy in these checks.”
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