By Tony Brookes, Sales Director, Vacancy Filler Recruitment Software
In April this year, CIFAS, the UK’s Fraud Prevention Agency, published a report1 which contained some alarming statistics regarding the rise of fraud during the recruitment process. According to the report, certain types of fraud has increased by some 70% since 2012 of cases where the individual supplied serious material falsehoods on or with their application, such as the failure to disclose adverse credit history (when a clean credit history was a requirement of the position) or claiming and providing details of professional qualifications that they did not hold.
Many organisations already carry out some form of background checking and will commonly use an external agency to carry out those checks on behalf of the employer. These checks can be comprehensive, to include identity and criminal records checking as well as verifying that the candidate has actually attained the qualifications and have worked for the employers they say they have. Depending on the nature of the employer’s business, these checks can often include financial checks too. The scope and how far back the checks are to be carried out, usually largely depends on the seniority of the role. This sometimes means that employers carry out limited or no checks on more junior roles.
Clearly these checks will continue to be necessary, but there are a number of drawbacks to this process both in the timeliness and inconsistency.
Although criminal record checks can only be carried out at the point of job offer and cannot be used as a means to shortlist candidates, other background checks can be used for this purpose. Integrating background checks into online recruitment can be done at a number of points in the process.
Identity Checking
Identity checking can be carried out at any point in the process. Having An identity checking service integrated with the recruitment process can greatly assist the timeliness of the overall process. These checks can often be carried out in real time and at relatively low cost. Checking candidates before they attend for interview is of course much preferable to having a candidate fail at the end of the process.
It is comparatively simple to check first name, last name, date of birth and current address against a number of databases such as the Edited Electoral Roll, Credit Header Data, National ID Register, Births Index and even the landline telephone directory .. Similarly, checking the validity of a passport, UK driving Licence, EU ID card or NI card can ensure that it’s not a forgery or stolen. This can be achieved by inviting the candidate to go online and upload an image of the document to the system to get an instant verification. A third check can be provided which compare the last two, to verify that the document, whilst it may not be a forgery, actually belongs to the individual. These steps greatly enhance the Right to Work verification process.
Each organisation will wish to verify different things. For example they may want to include an international dimension with an Enhanced Sanctions and Enforcements Check which verifies if an individual is present on over 80 global sanctions and enforcements lists. Similarly, driving licence validation can be verified against the DVLA but currently is not in real time whereas the other steps above can be.
Because the range and appropriateness of the check would be applicable for certain candidates and not others, it is important to build them into an organisation’s recruitment process and system. Having it built in to a job board for example, could provide some basic form of checking but it would not trap all candidates excluding those applying directly to your careers page or by some other means. It may not be role specific either.
Criminal Record Checking
Criminal Record Checks can be similarly integrated into the recruitment process but at the back-end at the point of job offer. The organisations that are required to perform Standard or Enhanced criminal record checks via the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS – formerly the Criminal Records Bureau) are those who work with children or vulnerable adults. They are likely to have their own DBS Compliance Officer and will use a bureau service to carry out the checks. Employers that do not work specifically with these groups can also use the service to conduct a basic check via Disclosure Scotland which will look for unspent convictions.
Integrating the criminal checking into the recruitment process can speed up the turnaround time for checks on average by 8 days compared to paper based applications.2
The service typically works as follows and interacts with the candidate asking the candidate to complete the application and upload a document to verify their identity
There are now many different businesses that preform these checks, for example crbdirect.org.uk are one of the best in the business.
Social Media
A number of employees are looking at social media to get some insight into a candidates’ past history. This clearly has mixed results and is down to individual interpretation of the results, which may not always give a true picture of a candidate. However, verifying candidates’ work history against LinkedIn is proving to be popular and if nothing else, can prompt for some interesting interview questions around any discrepancies.
Increasingly, organisations are requesting that identity checking and even criminal record checking modules are built into their online recruitment platform as companies try to save time and therefore money in the recruitment process. The streamlining of recruitment is becoming ever more important both to SMEs who need to use their time optimally and for larger enterprises, particularly where the recruitment process is delegated to regional managers, and this trend is likely to continue.
1https://www.cifas.org.uk/secure/contentPORT/uploads/documents/CIFAS%20Re....
2 For more information on this see http://www.criminalrecordchecks.co.uk/faqs-crb