Verity journal

Companies need to periodically hire workers to fill new positions, or replace someone who is leaving. But with the job market saturated with fresh graduates, the human resources department frequently have a pile of résumés to filter through. Once several suitable candidates are identified, they are usually called for an interview.

But how can you tell if the potential hire has “embellished” the truth in his CV? The worst thing you can do is hire someone for a specific job, only to find out later than they have no related skills at all. Not only have you wasted time and money, you now have the difficult task of firing the person you hired just months earlier.

However, hiring does not have to be a game of chance. There is a way to make a more informed decision – by pre-employment screening. It is a way for the company to verify the authenticity of the jobseeker’s qualifications.

It will help the company determine if the candidate has a criminal record, even whether or not he is behind in servicing his credit card debt. Of course, this is almost like spying on the person, and there are legal boundaries to worry about. Many businesses now understand that there is a need to pre-screen candidates before hiring them.

They can engage companies such as Verity Intelligence to conduct such checks. Verity Intelligence group managing director (Malaysia and Singapore), Mark Leow, points out that a bad hire can cost the company six to 10 times the errant employee’s salary in the form of cost of recruitment, time and lost opportunities to operational, training and re-hiring expenditure.

“If they had screened the individual before hiring him to make sure that he has all the credentials and is who he claims he is, the company would have improved its chances of hiring the best person for the job,” Leow says. To read more, check out pages 1+2 of Focusweek issue 145.

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