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Background Checks Could Save Your Company
By Randy Wyles | August 6, 2010
Is it a crime for a job applicant to lie on their résumé – or simply a moral issue that’s best left between them and their conscience? At the same time, does an employer have the right to conduct a “background” investigation on the job applicant as part of the application process – or is that an invasion of the applicant’s privacy?
According to a survey commissioned by CareerBuilder.com, of the nearly 8,800 workers interviewed across the United States for the survey, 8-percent admitted to enhancing some aspect of the information in their résumé. In addition, as part of the same survey, just over 3,100 employers said that when they checked, they found nearly half of their applicants had lied on their résumé.
If They Will Lie About This, They Will Lie About Other Things
The reality is that when private investigators are hired to perform background checks on potential employees, they discover that approximately 20-percent of the applicants have lied on their résumé. That means if you are hiring, you can expect one out of every five applicants to be lying about something on their résumé. This begs the question; If they will lie on their résumé to get the job, will they lie to you once they have the job?
This isn’t simply a matter of catching someone in a little “white lie” – it’s a matter of integrity which could ultimately carry your name with it. When someone in your company lies, they are dragging down the company’s reputation – which could mean lost sales, decreased revenue – even bankruptcy.
Background Checks Should Be Standard Procedure
Background checks of applicants can flag résumés laced with lies, as well as reveal any derogatory history such as criminal convictions and jail time – which can include DUI or DWI convictions, crimes perpetrated against company employees or employers and even acts of fraud against a previous employer. A background check can reveal the applicant’s credit history, military service records, college degrees – real or falsified – as well as the applicant’s grade point average while attending college.
Wouldn’t you prefer to know if your applicant really did have a 3.75 grade point average or if he or she actually completed their course of studies in aviation engineering? How about this simple question; “Does the college from where they “earned” their degree really exist?
As far as an individual’s privacy is concerned; employers have a right to investigate an applicant’s background, provided they obtain the applicant’s written permission prior to the investigation – and that the background check is conducted as part of the application process for each and every applicant. If he or she had been hired, the employer may still conduct a background check if the employee has been charged with or is under suspicion of having falsified the résumé that he or she used to land the job.
More than one high ranking corporate executive has been revealed as a fraud following a simple background check. The question you need to answer is; “Do you want the background check completed before he or she is hired or after the embarrassment of having to fire your new Chief Financial Officer – who, it turns out, did not get a degree from Princeton.
Topics: Background Investigations, Fraud, PI Articles, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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