Companies are now hiring background screeners to check details of your resume; US survey links bluffers to economic crisis

Have you ever fudged your CV to land that plum job? Do that now, and you may be in deep trouble. In the past two years, companies have been hiring background screeners to catch those who bluff on their resumes. A recent survey on background screening trends in India over the last two years indicates that the banking, finance and insurance sector has the highest such employment-related discrepancies, while the BPO sector has the least.

Many employees have been thrown out on grounds of submission of doctored resumes. A Mumbaikar, who was employed as a practice head in an IT firm last year, was found to have submitted fake degree certificates from IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Mumbai.

Surprisingly, his fake certificates were exposed only 20 years later, as none of the organisations he had worked with earlier had bothered to check the authenticity of his CV.

In another case, a BPO company was in for a shock when it found that a candidate they hired last year had been involved in making pornographic films. Thus, after his background screening, he was shown the door.

Not a detective agency

"A detective agency does its investigations stealthily without the knowledge of the person in question. But in case of background screening, we inform the candidate and carry out the checks with his authorisation. Our job is to verify the details mentioned in the resume," said Ashish Dehade, MD (West Asia), First Advantage, background screening and solutions provider.

Studies conducted in the US and the UK, over a period of time, have linked higher incidence of resume embellishments to downturns in the economy. The logic being that when there are fewer jobs on offer, more candidates choose to "do up" their resumes. Dehade added, "Although no such studies have been conducted in India, the logic may be applicable here as well."

CV fakers
Around 48 per cent of fake university documents cases come from North India, closely followed by Western India.
Pune tops the cities list for education-related discrepancies, followed by Mumbai and Delhi. 48% of criminal discrepancies come for North India, while 35% come from South India.