For an employer, it is a no-brainer to have the intention to carry out all sorts of background check possible on their prospective staff. At the end of the day, you are making a crucial decision when it comes to building a strong team for your venture. So as reference check has basically become the standard procedure for HR to vet the candidates, you might still be surprised by what result could come up from a thorough checking on a candidate’s or employee’s background, especially with a professional team like Herald with its meticulous methodology.
Honesty in performance is the least of your worries.
Out of all kinds of deceptive tactics deployed by job applicants, lying about one’s performance in the resume is just the tip of the iceberg. You would think hiring us to check with former employers is enough to assess a candidate’s truthfulness. However, that would be way too optimistic. Making up false job records and including a friend’s contact as a “former employer” is not exactly rocket science. Anyone can come up with that trick. What can better determine if someone is lying about his/her perfect job experience is to first check out if the contact information or reference letter looks fishy. A former employer with an email address in a public domain? Big red flag. It does not mean the candidate must be deceitful. It just means that not only do we need to check with the available contact, but we should get in touch with the HR department of the company based on our own research and seek their genuine review on this candidate’s performance with as much detail as possible.
In one of our previous cases, we noticed that the contact information given by the candidate was mostly just mobile phone numbers and email addresses provided by free email services. The information was presented on a reference letter, but the layout was way too minimalistic in our eyes (which at that point had already perused numerous reference letters over the years). Upon further research, not only was the contact information suspicious, the company mentioned on the resume was also just an unregistered and alleged start-up with a website not too different from a school project. Long story short, we contacted the person supposed to be the former supervisor, whose attitude on the phone was eerily evasive and aloof. And apart from their “official website” lacking any information about that supervisor or HR contacts, nothing in our search result remotely indicated the company was operating in the industry as they claimed. Eventually we presented all our findings to our client and hopefully they would make a wise decision on the hiring.
Competent, maybe. But what else?
The situation described above is just a basic scenario though. Even if someone is being honest about the resume, it still does not vouch for his/her integrity as a person. We all understand that an employer needs more than just a competent staff member but also a team player who can align oneself with the company’s values and vision. And to fulfil the need for the right pick among so many candidates, our Employment Background Check also sifts through piles of records in areas such as litigation, misconduct, and even online presence for ferreting out any derogatory findings that might hint at the candidate’s personal flaws.
Another case of ours is the epitome of that situation. In that case, the candidate seemed to be truthful about her resume. All the former employers checked out with positive feedback. Nothing on paper seemed shady. Sounds like the perfect fit, right? Not so soon. It turned out upon further checking on major social media platforms, the candidate had constantly made hateful comments about various topics, some of which were even targeting her former employers. Whether she had been hiding her grudges so well during her employment that her former boss was unaware, or it was the company policy not to disclose the candidate’s negative attitude as we checked with them in the first place, we might never truly know. But we figured our client, i.e. her current prospective employer, would be curious about what we had found.
All in all, to see whether a candidate is suitable for the company requires patience and keen observation on the employer’s part after recruitment. But our in-depth checking on your job applicants can definitely provide you with insights to avoid major pitfalls before you waste a substantial amount of time and energy training the wrong person. So, if you are interested in our Employment Background Check service or would like to seek professional advice, please do not hesitate to contact us.
