Shyam worked in Hewlett Packard’s (HP) Bangalore office for three years without any issues. And then, he quit. A few months later, Shankar joined the company and when he was in the canteen one day, some employees were surprised that he looked exactly like Shyam. Of course, Shankar denied any knowledge of Shyam. However, in the HR verification, it turned out that Shankar was indeed the Shyam they knew.
What had transpired was that Shankar had failed to get his college degree. So, his girlfriend, who worked in the company, used her brother Shyam’s degree to get Shankar a job. In the course of his two years at the company, Shankar passed and got his own degree. So, he re-applied, this time with his own degree, and got in. This is just one of those many ‘fake identity’ cases that unfold when background checks are conducted by companies to avoid such ‘events’.
Among Indian cities, Bangalore has emerged at the top when it comes to candidates tampering with their employment or address details when applying for a job. After Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi have most discrepancies in applications. These findings were presented in a second quarter (April-June) report by First Advantage, a firm specialising in background checks. Almost 4-5 lakh checks were conducted by the organisation in this period for this report, of which 9.3% were fraudulent, that is, 9out of every 100 applications had wrong details provided by candidates.
Wrong employment details provided by candidates were the biggest cause of discrepancy, accounting for 71.5% of all fraudulent cases. Discrepancies in address and education details were the next biggest reasons. Bangalore accounted for 24% of all fraudulent cases relating to employment details. Mumbai, with 17%, and Chennai, with 7.8%, followed. Bangalore also had the maximum cases related to discrepancies in address details with 19% of all address-related discrepancies in the country. Mumbai with 12.7% and Delhi with 8.2% followed. Chennai was fourth at 4.9%.
Candidates in the south zone tampered most with their employment and address details - accounting for almost 45% of fraudulent cases in these categories in the country - but were lowest when it came to providing wrong education details. However, candidates in north India were the highest among all zones in providing wrong education details for job applications. More candidates in the east zone provided wrong education details (23% of all education discrepancy cases), as many as south (10%) and west zone (13%) combined.
Companies are checking everything from bank statements, credit cards, social media and even drug testing in some cases. However, there is an entire industry at the other end of the spectrum too trying to combat these background checks.
