In order to ensure a perfect match between the job and the candidate, more and more employers are now going beyond a basic reference check and deploying a variety of tools to verify their antecedents.
“A decade ago, reference check of candidates used to be quite basic but from last five to six years, it has been observed that most global and large organisations are very conscious on checking candidate’s antecedents, which is deeper than a reference check”, said Sunil Goel, Director, GlobalHunt, an executive search firm.
“These reference checks are very popular in big MNCs but even large Indian conglomerate and mid-size organisations are also opting to this as they want their businesses to be managed by reliable people”, he said.
Apart from education, duration of employment, Key Result Areas (KRA), team size, achievements and compensation are very important factors to be checked, he said.
The need for deeper checks has assumed importance as it had become quite common for candidates to give references of friends by claiming them as their bosses, he said. Candidates sometime “claim their colleague’s achievements as their own and overall they try to give a rosy picture which misleads future employers”. It was found that professionals from small and mid-size organisations generally claim that their responsibilities included managing operations in India as well as in the SAARC region. Whereas on verification, one gets to know that the company’s business in other SAARC countries is either negligible or it has presence in one or two countries only, says an executive of a leading hiring firm.
Most of the time, people at the leadership level claim that they launched a particular product/service or they came up with a great idea. On assessment, one finds that they were just a part of the process for launching product/service.
In 30 to 60 minutes interview, a recruiter gets only a basic view. Well spoken people usually crack interviews and most of the time, evaluation process revolves around CVs. On job performance is not assessed and truth identification is left.
So to counter this problem, companies are now verifying basic facts, doing an in-depth assessment of KRAs and are also going for discreet reference checks from industry people for present job profile of a prospective candidate.
Earlier reference checks were confined to education, employment duration, compensation and general feedback, but now it was much more than that, the executive said. Firms are now focusing on KRAs which details the exact responsibilities that a candidate handled in previous jobs.
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