It is very useful to know the five most common (and costly) lies that applicants sometimes slip into their CVs. In the business world, every employee has the potential to affect a company’s performance, culture, and results. Hence the extreme importance of avoiding hiring the wrong candidate, which would prove to be a costly and even catastrophic mistake. A recent Right Management survey1 found that the cost of a recruiting error can be one to five times the employee’s salary. These costs are often the result of falsified data in the candidate’s CV.
According to the background checkers, job seekers often exaggerate, falsify their professional credentials, and sometimes brazenly lie about their job applications. Even if a candidate’s “embellished” CV is not strictly speaking a fraud, the fact of an employer relying on exaggerated or inaccurate data and arrest records can lead to a bad recruitment decision. This is why companies should consider comprehensive background checks to uncover dishonest or amplified information contained in CVs and job applications.
Often seen as a common practice in large businesses, background checks are just as important for small businesses. And while more and more small businesses today are using professional quality background checks, job seekers are still trying. “
Identifying candidates who lie in their CVs or job applications can be tricky and tedious for many small businesses. Using an external company (called a consumer intelligence agency or CRA) to check the background helps to unmask applicants who provide false data when they apply.
Here are some of the important tactics employers should adopt in order to embellish or even falsify their CVs:
1. Exaggerate years of experience- Almost a third of job applications contain anomalies in previous experience and education. Candidates often disguise the truth to fill gaps in their professional experience that they don’t want to talk about. This is particularly the case of this job seeker who extended the period of occupation of a position to cover a prison sentence of six months! Sometimes anomalies are the result of a real error, but employers must always check the dates of occupation of a position like https://www.truthfinder.com/background-check/.
2. Falsify the diploma or credential obtained- A candidate will sometimes claim to hold a specific diploma when he has in fact taken only a few relevant courses, or his CV may exaggerate a university program to give the impression that he is more qualified for the position. Other candidates create false diplomas, claim diplomas belonging to family members, or obtain titles from “diploma factories”. The latter category is very difficult to identify, but companies specializing in background checks compile detailed databases of diploma factories and are able to identify fraud.
3. Hide a court record- The main reason for many companies to do background checks is to keep the workplace safe or to mitigate risks. Another important reason is compliance. Some industries, such as financial services and health care, require employers to obtain applicants’ criminal histories, often depending on the type of position. Applicants seeking to have a criminal conviction removed from their files will often be attracted to small businesses, believing that they will not background check. These applicants often try to evade this type of research by not disclosing criminal convictions or by changing certain small details about their job applications,
Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine