Applicants is faking details in their bio-data is a serious malaise that merits to be nipped in the budding stages.

Instances of applicants securing jobs giving false information is nothing new but when the situation reached new heights in the information technology sector services two years ago, some of the leading domestic IT services companies took a tough stand. Hundreds of employees were quietly dismissed no sooner it was discovered that the information provided in their resume was false. A series of internal reviews led to the fraudulent employees getting caught. Investigations also revealed that some of the recruitment agencies had recruited dismissed employees, for helping them fake their Curriculum Vitaes (CVs).

Besides lodging of police complaints, such unscrupulous recruitment agencies were forced to refund the expenditure incurred by organisations in hiring staff. On one hand the demand for talent seems to be gaining importance. A number of applicants on the other side are eager to get into their dream job, although some of them without the requisite experience. There is high pressure on placement agencies to identify candidates at short notice to meet client needs. Making use of tile opportunity some corrupt recruitment agencies, with the collusion of candidates, have been found to cut and paste information related to academic qualifications, experience, salary etc., from one resume to another.

Various studies by background check firms have concluded that generally three out of every 10 job seekers in the country fake their CVs to get a job. Importantly, the malpractice is not merely a notional one. The problem of fake CVs is not just at entry level, in some cases; background checks on senior positions had led to the detection of fake academic and experience certificates. The country does not have an effective documentation process as prevalent in some of the countries abroad where through the Social Security number one can ascertain details about an individual. To check the growing menace of false CVs, a National Skills Registry developed by Nasscom has duly verified information on a candidate’s personal, academic and employment details. But the system is still in its infancy because we have only about two dozen employee verification agencies in India of which only seven are reportedly certified by Nasscom.

The cost of a wrong hire would be significantly more than actual hiring cost. Also, most of the cases involving wrong hires do not get detected at the screening level but only at some stage at the work place that these people get exposed. Since hiring, training and on-boarding a bad entry-level candidate for a minimum of three months costs a company up to Rs 3 lakh and lateral hiring almost double, at the organization level, some firms have made the recruitment procedure more stringent. Also, increasingly, screening activities are separated from the hiring agencies and different agencies are used for verification checks. To put a check on black sheep, some domestic IT majors have even started sharing its database of job applicants who have faked information in their CVs to their competitors.