Blocking and chaining resume fraud

A mini-industry has come up to manage employee background checks. Studies indicate that one in five resumes have information discrepancy that is serious enough to be considered a fraud

Resume fraud has long worried employers in India. For years, companies that hire in large numbers have struggled to verify and conduct effective background checks on prospective employees.

Educational institutions have to face hundreds of requests every year to confirm whether a candidate was a genuine student. Some institutions charge a fee for such confirmations (or denials). 

So much so, that a mini-industry has come up to manage background checks on employees. Now, blockchain-based tech models are entering the field to support employers in background checks. Some studies indicate that at least one in five resumes have information discrepancy which is serious enough to be considered a fraud. 

Smaller firms do not have the resources or time to do background checks, though large companies hire agencies for authenticating resumes. 

A new model prepared by Hyderabad-based ThynkBlynk Technologies is deploying blockchain for creating a seamless chain of authenticated information flow.  Thynkblynk has created the CHAINTrail platform which brings together a clutch of organisations, including employers, academic and training institutions to share and use relevant information. Individual professionals can also participate in the CHAINTrail by volunteering the data on their resumes. 

Four large Fortune 500 companies with Global Capability Centres in India with close to 40,000 employees in various back-offices have joined CHAINTrail India and are piloting digital fingerprinting of verified employee credentials. Thynkblynk says this initiative will be rolled out India-wide and then globally. This will allow consortium participants and non-participants access to employee data after seeking individual consent, as required by data privacy guidelines.

This is how it works. The background check is done by the first company and is on-boarded by CHAINTrail. Then the subsequent users accept it and add to it. Any time an employee joins one of the consortium members, the employer will check and authenticate the information and add it to CHAINTrail. When a new employer needs to check the information, all they need is to check CHAINTrail information on the employee.

Once the employee joins, the information about the employee is added by the new employer. The information which is accessed is the digital fingerprint of the document. The digital fingerprint is an encryption composite of the data or document, signatories and a few other data elements. This information by itself is of no value and meaningless for a data thief. 

The data or document itself is stored off-chain. In all storage models, every document or piece of data is encrypted with its unique key, and further, the key is encrypted using a Key Vault service on the cloud. In the event of data breach of CHAINTrail, the original documents will not be compromised. 

“This model is scalable and many relevant institutions can join in. Colleges and universities can be part of it and authenticate the data at the beginning,” says Parag Jain, co-founder and chief executive officer of ThynkBlynk. Jain says organisations should be viewing it as an opportunity to capture every event with a recognisable, transparent and verifiable digital fingerprint. When strung together with other infinite digital events, it builds real information value for all stakeholders. 

The model created by ThynkBlynk is innovative enough for the education and employer ecosystem to dwell on. National education regulators should explore such models to prevent frauds and create an ecosystem of trust-based accreditation. 

Such a combination of robotic process automation, or RPA, and blockchain can bring security and efficiency in the authentication of various types of documents. These processes can be applied in various other fields, such as insurance claims and welfare benefits identity authentication. Any process where human capital data needs authentication for delivering an objective can benefit from such models.