Are you sure you can trust your applicant’s CV?
A big number of companies around the world decide to believe the information on their job applicant’s CVs right away, others, playing it smarter, decide to perform a background check on this data. According to research 85% of applicants lie on their CV and only in the US 500,000 people hold a fake degree. I am not telling you that you shouldn’t trust anyone, but you must be careful when deciding who should be a part of your team, and verifying information when hiring surely helps with this.
In our digital, globalized world, paper certificates are no longer valid, for they can easily be falsified or tampered with. It is not enough to see a name or a degree written in a paper to know it’s true. This is not a problem that only small or medium companies face, even the biggest enterprises get lied to. Let me tell you some of the most famous cases of lies on CVs. If these companies had just performed a background check to their candidates before hiring they would’ve saved a crazy amount of time and money, and they would’ve spared the scandal.
- Scott Thompson. The Ex-CEO of Yahoo claimed he had computer science and accounting degrees from Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. In fact, he only had an accounting degree.
- Marilee Jones. She was the dean of admissions from 1997 to 2007 at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she kept for 28 years the lie that she had three degrees. In reality, she had none.
- David Edmondson. He became RadioShack’s CEO in 2005, but he resigned in 2006, after admitting that he falsely claimed to have two degrees when he had zero.
Your company is like your child, you only want the best for it, that’s why HR departments make such a great effort in hiring only the best candidates. Usually they base on the experience candidates claim they have, but they don’t get to confirm that this is true, harming the future performance of the company and getting weaker results than what they were expecting.
In conclusion, it is extremely important for your company’s health to make sure that what your applicants claim on their CV is true. You don’t need to verify this information yourself, it will certainly take a while and there are companies which are experts on discovering this for you. Hiring a background screening company is the most appropriate and effective solution to this problem, it will allow you to be sure that you pick the perfect candidate for the job.
