Companies spend several millions every year on recruitment and training of personnel, both of which are very time and resource intensive processes. Recruiting a wrong candidate, who may not be the best fit for the job profile you have in mind can lead to severe losses. As the saying goes, its better to be safe than sorry.
Doing some background checks on the prospective candidates, getting feedback from past employers can go a long way in ensuring that the time and money expended in the process is worth it.
As an HR manager or a business owner, you come across falsifications in CVs on a daily basis. While you may be able to figure out some during an interview, chances are that you would get to know about the others only when the person joins the job. With an employee reference check, you can minimize such risks and know more about a person than is apparent through the CV or through an interview.
There are several agencies that perform background checks for potential employees and the charges depend on the depth of information required. Small to mid size organizations however, find these professional background checks expensive and tend to rely more on their own judgment when hiring someone. With the advent of online social and business networking, it has now become easier to sift and obtain data on employees. If they have a profile on orkut or myspace, you may get some idea of their personalities – this however may not be a realistic representation in some cases but is still worth considering.
On certain business networking sites, profiles often have recommendations from clients and colleagues. This can be a very good reference point but as in all cases, with a caveat. The recommendations at times seem like a case of you scratch my back, I will scratch yours. So it might be a good idea to check if the recommendations are not reciprocal.
If you are looking for more info on the candidate and are on a budget, then just checking up with past employers on the candidate’s credentials and performance can provide a wealth of information. Salary slips, experience certificates are very often fudged and in industries where demand for skilled professionals far outstrips the supply, companies often tend to recruit whoever they “can get” to fill up the vacancy instead of figuring out the “right fit”. This is as much a cause as this is a result of the high attrition rates for the IT and BPO industries in India.
SimplyRefCheck.com provides employers a free platform to help each other make the right choices in hiring candidates. The concept is based on the age old philosophy of helping others to help yourself. If everyone provides feedback on their past employees and if this data is available readily for free, your chances of wasting precious time and money on bad recruitments are reduced drastically.
For deserving employees too, the system provides benefits. If a past employer rates an employee high, the candidate’s job prospects improve. A recommendation from a past employer carries far more weight than a reciprocal recommendation from a colleague.
It is with us now to make a choice. To decide whether to spend a few minutes sharing feedback or to waste months on recruitment and training of misfits.
