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A dwindling economy, clubbed with an inverse relationship between the job openings and job seekers, has made the job search scenario quite competitive. In the race to grab the few options open to them, seekers tend to pose themselves as what they really are not—and what they never might become, either.
The exaggeration in the résumé might vary from a small adjustment in the marks, to an experience they never had, to a designation in a company that never existed! Sometimes they might not lie; instead, might just hide a few details of their professional past. These little things will matter—and matter in the biggest way to companies who hire them!
Hiring an employee involves a lot of investment to the employer—from facilitating the recruitment and training, to the initial learning curve period. Such huge investments on the wrong candidate will reflect very badly on the company. The money and efforts invested turns out to be futile and the company’s reputation is also affected.
A global workforce makes it all the more important to focus more into your manpower. It is ultimately the main strength of the company and flaws would affect the company negatively. The growing instances of cab-drivers crimes and the involvement of some IT people in scandalous crimes have given shocks to the world. A decade ago, reputed companies were trusted blindly, but with their lack of proper employee screening, stand-alone incidents have led them to loss of public trust.
It is best to insulate your business from potential liability through proper pre-employement screening of potential candidates. It is most likely that applications may consist of fabrications. Only a thorough check will bring out the exaggerated resumes and the discrepancies involved.
Again, don’t stop at just verifying the current job/designation status of a candidate. Go in deeper; do a thorough check on: criminal background, references (the referee should be a valid person!), testimonials from collegues / teachers / clients, etc. A proper background screening, will help you hire the right candidate. Once this is done, you can be assured that the qualifications and achievements claimed in the résumé are not manipulated. This ensures that the person coming for the post is aptly qualified for it.
Do the following to avoid a bad hire…
Avoid Turnover: It will also help to avoid turnover rates in companies. One of the main financial problem faced by the companies today are increase in turnover. Proper employee check will let you know if the employee is a constant job-hopper or has misappropriated data in any manner which will lead to his/her termination in the near future.
Crime check: A detailed check into the employees past will help to avoid problems like theft and other malpractices within the office. There are various instances where the company has lost its reputation because of its employees’ involvement in crime. Such situations can be avoided.
Employee Morale: A proper employee check will boost the employer’s morale, as he can be confident of his own workforce. And it is equally assuring for the employees as it would assure them of a safe work place with trustworthy peers.
Productivity: Hiring the wrong candidate involves a lot of loss, including the productivity disruption that occurs during the person’s training, to his learning stage and again during his replacement. A perfect candidate would help a company avoid all such problems.
Hence a proper scrutiny is always a better option than blindly believing your prospective employee’s cooked up résumé. Falsifications, no matter how minor they seem to be, will always prove to be disastrous later. It is better to be equipped with a stronger work pool, of whom you can be confident.
How we can help
At Crederity, we verify information regarding identities, background check, pre-employment screening, education and employment verification, online checks, legalities, criminal checks, references, experiences, employment status… We also gather information from references directly and authenticate even them! If you are hiring through a recruitment agency, we will verify them as well!
If it’s a résumé that has the Credulity Seal, you can trust it with your eyes closed! And if the resume lacks one, we can verify and seal it for you!
Invest in Crederity. Invest in trust!
Résumé, a French word that means “summary”, is every professional’s first point of contact with a prospective employer.  True to its meaning, a résumé is supposed to present a brief but relevant summary of one’s skills, qualifications and employment details. A résumé should ideally be contained in one side—two, at the most—of an A4 sheet. Ideally, it should not list one’s education and qualifications in detail (including year, institution, etc.) but should highlight just the specific skills, presented in a customised way to target the job description.
A good résumé:
- contains bulleted information
- is written in the third person
- is objective and formal
- contains, in this order, a brief Summary of Qualifications, Areas of Strength or Expertise, Professional Experience (in reverse chronological order), Professional Affiliations, Computer / Technical Skills and Education
- gives maximum focus to the most recent job (prior experiences are summarised)
- provides the reader a balance of responsibilities and accomplishments for each designation held.
Unarguably, your résumé forms part of the first impression your potential employer gets of you. In this economy, with a massive down turn of jobs, most employers have to face a stack of such résumés. What does it take, to ensure that of the whole lot, your résumé piques your employer’s interest?
A résumé has become the key to your dream job…but it gets just 10-15 seconds before the employer decides between his desk and the dustbin as your résumé’s final destination.
Specific job applications can be more targeted. It is always good if you know the company before-hand and enhance your résumé, customising it to their requirements. That way, you can present your qualification, experience and achievements in the way that suits the recruiter and the needs best. To the maximum extent possible, make it as brief, concise and to the point—like a capsule that is quickly edible, rather than as a 5-course meal! This will make it easy for the employer to sort through the résumés. A covering letter would ideally help you project your achievements and your suitability to the position offered, in a much concise and customised manner.
While writing your résumé…
If you intend to submit your résumés in online job portals, do it only after making sure that your Résumé has all the necessary industry-specific keywords. Search engines should be able to pull out your profile every time an employer is out there seeking for potential employees.
Consider your résumé as a marketing tool…and make the most of it to market a very invaluable product—You!
Dos
- Customise it, as much as possible, to the job in question.
- Fonts like Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana and Palatino Linotype would be good choices—since they are the ones popularly used and available on every computer these days. Fancy fonts might look good on your system—but if the recipient does not have it installed in the receiving system, your résumé could boil down to squares and dots and illegible symbols! Not to mention your employer may not share your taste in fonts.
- Restricting the font-size between 10 and 12 and formatting the text with bullets and margins will help enhance readability. As in all things, simplicity is the key here: so keep the language and format basic and easy to comprehend.
- Author it powerfully and substantially.
- There are a lot of employers who use online technologies to sort résumés. Hence, it is safer to make it as neat and as presentable as possible.
Don’ts
- Avoid stuffing too much of personal data that is of no interest to the employer.
- Avoid padding—adding elaborate words and decorating it with unnecessary sentences will only irritate the employer!
- Never fabricate experiences, education, references, and other credentials. Not only is this unethical, but most employers routinely conduct verification and checks. Once false information is uncovered, consider your job goodbye.
Social media sites like Linkedin, Facebook and MySpace have become very popular among industrial bigwigs in searching for, and finding, potential employees. Hence, when you are in the lookout for a job, you can use all your web profiles to show why you are an ideal candidate. The greater your visibility, the better your chances–assuming you use your web presence to your advantage.
With a wounded economy, scarce vacancies, and a multitude of applicants, the situation becomes extremely competitive and frustrating. To surface as the perfect choice from a plethora of résumés is a challenging task–remember that the employer reviewing your résumé is probably furstrated as well. So, create a résumé that works best for both parties—you and the employer.
As in all matters of life, reliability and trust is very important when seeking a job. Employers carry out various checks—pre-employment screening, identity verification, reference verifications, etc precisely because trust can be very difficult to attain during these early interactions, and even if trust exists, verification must accompany it. A ‘seal of verification’ in your résumé which affirms that your credentials have been verified and which allows the resume viewer to review the verification records will save the employer a lot of trouble! Here at Crederity, we’ve found that over 85% of hiring employers would prefer to review such resumes. If you’re curious, you should try out Crederity.
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Social media marketing has hit the mainstream. Irrespective of a preference, you evolve an online identity as soon as you establish yourselves with your customers. Branding today is not what it used to be. Perceived brand is the word of the day. Consumers can now air their opinions more easily and word-of-mouth now spreads faster and stays longer.
All these facts make reputation management important for brands. Search engines pull up all information related to the brand once customers hit a search. These portals do not see whether the information pulled up is accurate; algorithmically-calculated relevance is the only factor in consideration. If potential customers have access to positive information, it serves the brand best…but vice versa also applies.
Online reputation management is built on establishing trust online. Search engines like Google and Yahoo have become the sacred book for customers who are confused with the number of brands ruling the consumer world. Until your brand earns their trust and positive news is spread, you are doomed.
Manage online reputations…
There are several ways to do this:
- Try and build trust among customers
- Try to be a name that they feel they can rely on
- Be accessible (when people feel that they can reach you at any given point of time, there is a feeling of security that sets in)
- Use client testimonials (it will ultimately act as word-of-mouth publicity for your customers; that, your brand has been used and is preferred by others, assures them to a certain extent about your quality and credibility)
- Publish photographs—be it of your organisation, key leaders, the CFO or the team, photographs are a face to the name online. With the increasing number of impersonators in the cyber world, customers are not to be blamed for doubting your credibility, if you have not taken the trouble to build that essential rapport with them.
- Make yourself easy to contact–provide phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses
In this new age of customer reviews and blogs—about almost all things in the world—it is highly necessary for you to manage your reputation by constant monitoring, analysis and influencing of online content. Statistics prove that only the first two pages of what search engines pull out is viewed by the average searcher. Hence, if you can monitor negative news or complaints about you or your brand within this space, you’ve already gone a long way in safeguarding yourself.
The ideal way to tackle negative content is to respond promptly and address the issue—either through an apology or through an explanation. This way, you can create enough positive content to push these negative comments down the line. As a rule of thumb, avoid any kind of defensive attitude while on the Internet—this will only let loose a tornado of negativity your way.
Active participation helps propagation of good news of your brand–do not think you are above the level of being an active participant in social media. Reviewing the stream of blogs and customer reviews written in response to you helps to have a clear understanding as to how your brand is perceived by your customers and allows you to take informed, effective steps to handle the situation. Google alerts, Technorati and Twitter are real-time tools that help in monitoring online content. Technology today demands brand owners to invest in their online identity and maintain a stable credibility with their online customers for the company’s existence.
If you have an online business, your online credibility is one of the most important matters that you should give due consideration to. It is this factor that makes people register for your services, click on ads or just keep coming back to your site—and to your services. It is almost synonymous with the idea of a successful business.
How Crederity helps…
When you have a Crederity verified seal on your web page, you demonstrate that you are a verified, reliable and credible company or person. Crederity verifies a plethora of information regarding a person or a business: identities, background check, references, experiences, and much more. This is all information that, when verified by a trusted third party authenticator like Crederity, puts your audience more at ease, helping them to initiate or participate in a relationship with trust and confidence, both online and offline! We encourage you to join Crederity to invest in yourself, and to invest in trust!
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It is the age of the web. People thrive online and virtually live there! Naturally, online identity has become as important as real world identity. With the onset of the increased interaction enabled by the Internet and e-commerce, identity fraud and crime have reached a new level of significance.
Thousands become victim to identity thieves every year throughout the world. Often, the fraudsters trick innocent web users into providing personal information and then use the information illicitly. Forged identities are also quite common.
Credit card thefts and unauthorized credit accounts opened without one’s knowledge are another typical example of identity theft. The victim’s identity is misappropriated and used for making expensive purchases or opening new accounts. The potential for such frauds have become a major hurdle for e-commerce.
Many of the reported identity crimes have been cases where the rich and famous are exploited. Money, power and the sheer thrill of the risk involved seemed to have attracted many towards such identity crimes.
 Christopher Rocancourt shot to fame by conning many rich and famous personalities in the US by pretending to be a Rockefeller heir, a movie producer, a global financier, the son of Sophia Loren or the nephew of Dino De Laurentis. Rosario Poidimani (an Italian Businessman) impersonated the King of Portugal and sold imaginary aristocratic titles and fraudulent diplomatic passports, with the support of imaginary offshore bank accounts and an elaborate throne room.
Through sites like snopes.com and truthorfiction.com, many such scams have been bought to our attention. For instance, the Nigerian scam mails requesting the transfer of a huge fortune to the recipient’s bank account, in return for which they assure a percentage of the fortune to the recipient. There are certain others who claim that you have won a lottery worth billions. In all such cases, they ask for your account details and use this information for illegitimate actions. Phishing is where the fraudster poses as a legitimate organization, bank, etc., and asks the user to update their personal information. Their website will be almost similar to the original one, and it is hard to spot the difference.
One of the safest ways to safeguard one’s identity online is to establish an indisputably authentic identity verified through trusted sources. Online reputation management involves monitoring your identity online, analyzing and influencing it. If you are an individual, get verified and show that you are who you claim t obe through your website / blog / online pages. If you run a company, odds are high that your customers will have voiced their opinions about you via the Internet. When potential customers type your company name in search engines, the first two pages are the most likely to be viewed by them. It is your responsibility to monitor this space and see whether it contains positive or unwarranted negative news about your company or products. You can keep constant track of what is being written about you by subscribing to Technorati, RSS feeds, Google alerts, etc.
Life on the web has become intertwined with normal life, and our identity and reputation online are immensely important for us to safeguard.
It is our hope that Crederity can help you with helping to establish a credible identity online. With a dedicated team entirely focused on fraud issues, Crederity can help safeguard you against online identity thieves, providing an additional hurdle over which would-be thieves must surmount. We invite you to invest in Crederity, and invest in Trust. We also invite you to contact us with any suggestions you have for improving Crederity, as we value your feedback and fully intend to do the best job that we can in helping to safeguard and enhance your identity online.
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For more info, click here.
After 14 hours of non-stop talking, interspersed with a few hours of rest, we are finally getting back to our office following up on all the requests we received while at Startup City 2009 .
We showcased Crederity at Silicon India Startup City 2009 on June 6,2009 in Bangalore. Startup City is one of the largest start up events in Bangalore where 100 start ups showcased their products to an audience comprising of tech enthusiasts , Venture Capitalists and other start ups.
The highlight of the event for Crederity was the enthusiastic response we received at our stall for our services and products. The idea behind Crederity as well as the simplicity of our product and service struck a chord with so many people as they came over to relay some of their unfortunate marriage and employee experiences which could have been avoided with reliable back ground checks.
Employee Life Cycle Management Suite – One of our products to reduce the turn around time during hiring was also selected to be among Top 10 cool enterprise products in this event. Our entire team is super excited with the the response from the visitors and with the numerous possibilities that our services offer to consumers all over the world, and we realize that we have miles to go before we can fulfill these expectations.
A big thank you to the committed team behind Startup City , and to all our well wishers who visited us in our stall. For everyone , who has applied for the FREE Trial of our Employee Life Cycle Management Suite- it will be reaching you with in three days.
They say that lying comes naturally to humans; so it’s of no surprise that résumés will lie as well! It has almost become an epidemic of sorts. One never knows where it may originate from; and there seems no ways of finding a vaccine and curing it forever. As an individual looking to get hired, you can differentiate yourself by making it clear that your resume has integrity, such as by getting a Crederity seal. As a hiring HR professional or recruiter, it is very important to make sure to background check and verify the resumes of the individuals you express interest in, lest it be based on false information.
A few examples and numbers of resume fraud…
- In February 2006, David Edmondson (President and CEO) of RadioShack Corp.—a leading electronics retailer of US—was forced to resign for putting up false credentials in his résumé.
- VERITAS, the international software giant, sacked its former CFO for having falsely claimed a Stanford MBA in his résumé.
- In the UK, 39% of organisations admit to have gone through situations, ending up hiring people who has supposedly lied in their job application.
- According to BBC Risk Advisory Group 2004 study: two-thirds of the résumés they received had discrepancies! Of the various statistics:
- Women in their 30s were the worst offenders
- 55% of CVs had employment discrepancies
- 36% changed academic details
…and a very interesting caught-in-the-act instance!
The Port Authority of New York, in the late 90s, published an ‘electricians with experience in using Sontag conductors required’ advertisement. Almost one-third of the applicants claimed they had experience in using a Sontag conductor. The catch? A ’Sontag conductor’ didn’t exist!
The 10-point formula to catch that dishonest résumé
- Check for inconsistencies — slip-ups in dates, contradictions between job titles and duties, etc.
- Make interviewees fill out applications—and compare this with the résumé! Thanks to various “professional résumé writers”, most applicant do not even realise what is on their résumé. Some recruitment agencies juggle information between various résumés, creating fraud (with the approval of candidates).
- Test the applicant’s skills—through on-site, hands-on tests; check if claims of proficiency in a program or skill are true.
- Check references, then ask for more—do not be satisfied with the references in the résumé. They’re obviously ‘good’ sources. Ask for details of a colleague/supervisor/ex-employee and follow up on them.
- Make sure institutions exist—call the college admissions office, verify degrees and other claims.
- Investigate deep into “self-owned business” claims—names and numbers of past clients. Try to get their details / samples of the work done for them.
- Don’t confuse referrals with references—thoroughly check candidates referred by co-workers or friends.
- Don’t blindly trust your hiring consultants—one never knows if they have passed on a well-screened résumé. Do your own verification checks.
- Analyse why the applicant left his previous company—the situations; and if the firm had been liquidated firms, try and understand what role the applicant played towards the company’s fate.
- Do not be biased against a set/group of people—come out of the stereotyped thought that only youngsters stoop to such frauds; reports show that 49% of the perpetrators were above 40.
- And finally – verify the potential employee’s background using the world-wide-web. Probe deep into any mismatch with the details given in the résumé.
At Crederity, we’re trying to make it easier to accomplish some of the steps above and others to assess the authenticity and credibility of credentials and identity, to benefit both job seekers and employers, as well as people from all walks of life outside of the employment context.
What happens during a bad hire?
It is estimated that in the US, a single bad hire can bring losses of $25,000, in the case of a entry-to-mid-level position, and close to $1 million or more for an executive position. A bad hire can also mean an estimated loss to companies of approximately $40,000 in severance pay, training, wasted human resources time, possible search firm fees, loss of productivity, and impact on employee morale.
In today’s rat-race job market, many people are ready to go to any means to make the recruiter believe that they are the ones the company needs. And if you thought it happens only in small-scale institutions, where the chances of a background check may be perceived to be less likely, well you’ve already read what happens in big, multinational companies!
Pre-employment screening, though an added step, is a smart idea; you only stand to benefit! Accept it: the expense of a bad hire far outweighs the cost of a background check.
Crederity is the solution
We at Crederity currently verify a plethora of information including identity audits and identity verification, background checks, pre-employment screening, education verification, employment verification, online checks, legalities, reference checks, employment status check…You name it, and we’ll get it done! We gather information from references and relevant credential-granting organizations directly and even authenticate them! Our technology also allows us to complement our existing proccess with the use of web-administered quizzes for individuals combined with response analysis to determine how truthful an individual is being. And if you are hiring through a recruitment agency, we will verify them as well! So, if it’s a résumé that has the Crederity Seal, you can gain peace of mind that the resume holder has passed a significant test of integrity.
We think we have built a great system for helping to build trust online, but we know there is always room for improvement . As always, if you have suggestions on how we can improve our services to better address these problems, please let us know!
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