Don't cheat your way in

ETHICS: Incidents of fraud are making it necessary for firms to verify the antecedents of all recruits, giving rise to a new industry.

With recent incidents of fraud making it necessary forfirms to verify the antecedents of recruits, an industry has cropped up over the last three to four years. And it's growing at a blistering pace.

Nobby Nazareth of Evaluationz India Pvt Ltd, a joint venture between executive search firm Nobby Nazareth Associates and Globe Detective Agency, estimates its size at Rs 500 - 800 crore. Globe also helps firms keep track of their employees and their activities.

Pre-employment background checks (PEBCs) have become a norm thanks to the risk perspective in almost all industries today. "It is more so in the case of IT and ITeS sectors," says Col.

Swapan Bhadra, CEO of Verifacts, a firm that conducts PEBCs. Col Bhadra, who counts some of the top global corporations and top Indian IT firms among his clients, however estimates the size of the industry at a much smaller Rs 200 crore.

With the demand for manpower remaining high and the need for businesses to scale up in short periods, it is not always possible for companies to check a potential recruit's background thoroughly enough.

A security breach detected in June at HSBC's offshore data-processing unit in Bangalore had led to £233,000 being stolen from the accounts of about 20 UK customers.

A 24-year-old worker at the HSBC operation was caught for accessing confidential account information and passing it on to his associates in the UK.

Fears of the security of offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) operations were heightened by reports claiming that the HSBC employee also used fake marksheets to get the job in the first place. He was caught when the bank's security systems detected the fraud.

The diffculty however is to gain access to accurate information. Says Arpinder Singh, director of KPMG, which conducts screening of job applicants: "In the US, employers can use centralised databases to get background information on job candidates. But India doesn't have a comprehensive, centralised national database."

Adds Nipa Singh, a director of Mumbai-based First Advantage, another company that carries out PEBCs: "One of the biggest challenges that we have is unavailability of online or digitized information. This makes it very time consuming for us to complete such checks, as we have to actually visit the concerned institutions to get verifications. Moreover, we do not have a centralised criminal database with a national footprint. This makes it extremely complex to have a comprehensive countrywide criminal check conducted on any individual."

But global integration of businesses has made background checks more important. Says Achuthan Nair, Vice President - Resourcing, Wipro Technologies: "We do pre-employment checks for every employee recruited from the market, but not for campus recruitees."

For these, the check is done for education qualifications on a sampling basis i.e. for 10-15 per cent. For all people with work experience, Wipro checks the last two employment details.

For customers who specify the checks that need to be done, Wipro also does additional checks for criminal background, drug trafficking and other details that may be asked for.

Kisholoy Gupta, VP-Human Relations at GCI Solutions, points out that many firms have so many employees that people hardly know each other, and hence the need for checks.

"In such a large crowd of strangers, it is very tempting to cross boundaries of morality and ethics. The probability of anything wrong likely to happen is much more than in a traditional firm or industry."

An industry like outsourcing is relatively young and its reputation can easily be damaged, adds Gupta. So firms are now unforgiving of those who try to cheat their way into a job.

To check the veracity of a person's claims on the salary earned in the previous job firms nowadays demand bank statements to detect discrepancies between what is claimed and what shows up in the account.

If a discrepancy is found the candidate can say goodbye to the job, says B S Murthy, CEO of Human Capital, a Bangalore-based recruitment firm.