You’re a hiring manager and the resume in your hands is almost too perfect to be real. You know that statistically, as unemployment rates rise, so do the instances of falsified information on resumes. Your experience has given you a healthy dose of skepticism and you know what’s at stake if you make a bad hire:
- The expense of training and on-boarding if it turns out your new hire was unqualified after all.
- The liability of bringing someone on with a serious criminal record.
- The chance that the new hire has damaging punctuality and productivity issues.
So how do you mitigate the risk of making a bad hire? You invest in verification screening to cross-check each of the candidate’s claims. Only that way will you know for sure if their resume is too good to be true, or the ideal find.
Just as the term suggests, “verification screening” is the process of systematically verifying the claims listed on a candidate’s resume. You’ll wonder why you don’t use this type of screening in your dating life. There is a verification process for each section of the resume:
- Employment history
- References
- Education credentials
- Professional certifications
So is it worth it? That depends on how much you value your time. For companies trying to thrive in today’s market, waste is not an option. In addition to the cost of onboarding a new hire (in the form of paperwork, issuing security badges, arranging workspace, etc.), you must also take into consideration the salary of your trainer and the investment of time in the new hire’s assimilation into the company. Imagine that after all this, you start seeing signs that they don’t actually have the knowledge and experience they claimed they had during the interview process. Don’t take that chance. Invest in verification screening.
