More employees are lying about their credentials to bag a job offer – as background check discrepancy levels have increased about 48% in 2016-17 compared to corresponding year 2015-16. As per the recently released Authbridge’s Annual Trends Report on Background Screening in India, 15 in every 100 cases has an element of mismatch between information supplied and information verified.

According to AuthBridge’s Annual Trends Report on Background Screening in India, background check discrepancy levels have jumped to 15.21 per cent in 2016-17, from 10.29 per cent in 2015-16.

“Increased competition and easy access to job related information, along with a dynamic job market, has led to increased faking of information by candidates,” Ajay Trehan, founder and CEO, AuthBridge, said, adding that “organisations are responding to these challenges by developing structured background verification programmes to ensure they only hire trusted candidates with the right fit”.

Employment verification witnessed the maximum discrepancy followed by address verification, reference check and education verification respectively. Consistently for the last three financial years (FY 2015-17), it has been observed that a male candidate is more likely to misrepresent facts compared to females.

For all major checks, we observe that males are more likely to fake information compared to females. On the other hand, Reference Check has interestingly witnessed trend reversal in the last three years where the number of males and females faking information has had an alternating trend.

In terms of sector, the financial services industry had the maximum discrepant cases with a rate of 24.99 per cent, followed by the telecom, ISP and telecom infrastructure industry.

Western India witnessed the maximum discrepant cases in FY 2017 followed by Central India.

This calls for structured background verification across industries. Among all the checks conducted through the last financial year, employment verification witnessed the maximum discrepancy followed by address verification, reference check and education verification respectively. During Employment verification, majority of the candidates were found faking tenure and giving details of Referee who do not respond. During Education verification, majority of the candidates did not provide required documents or produced fake/forged documents. During Address verification, majority of the candidates were found to not reside at the given address or produced an untraceable address. During Reference verification, majority of the referees did not respond to verification calls. Financial Services industry had the maximum discrepant cases.

According to a UN report, India will witness over a billion people entering the job market by 2050. Recruitment for fresher is often a winding process for employers; as the traditional scrutiny processes for hiring can be quite cumbersome and costly. Most HR departments are overburdened and in several cases understaffed, and they also often lack technology-based infrastructure. Apart from conducting background checks of new and incoming employees, they also end up spending a lot of productive time in fulfilling incoming verification requests from other employers; about former employees. 

An authentic verification of a new hire not only plays an instrumental role in establishing trust but also reduces the potential risk to the reputation and safety of a company. In order to avoid any breach in the work culture or overall organizational productivity, it is imperative to conduct thorough background checks on jobseekers via documents issued by the government or private organizations, identity proofs, education credentials, checking with personal and professional references and so on. It has been found that 90% of employers in the organized sector, with the exception of IT, banking and financial services, conduct background checks of minimal order. In addition, the ease of availability of fake documents and certificates pose a huge threat to the authenticity of the entire process. In India alone, there are close to 7,500 companies, which provide fake documents and employment certificates. 

The data for this report has been collated from the millions of cases and checks conducted by AuthBridge in the last three financial years i.e. FY 2015, FY 2016 and FY 2017.

View the full report here