Indian IT and BPO firms, which are grappling to find and retain the right employees, are now facing the daunting task of weeding away the black sheep as a recent survey shows that one in every four CVs submitted for an IT job contains some kind of discrepant information.
A report by a background screening firm First Advantage suggests that in the IT sector, one in every four CVs has some kind of discrepant information and in the BPO sector one in every six CVs has a discrepancy.
The report said one and a half in every five persons have been found to misrepresent some information or the other in their job applications. Out of that, the BFSI sector tops the list with the maximum number of discrepancies, one in every third individual followed by the IT and ITeS sector.
"The instances of applicants securing jobs giving false information is not new but the situation has now reached new heights in the IT sector which has forced the leading IT firms like TCS, Satyam, Cognizant and others to take a tough stand," First Advantage Managing Director (West Asia) Ashish Dehade said.
The advent of a truly global workforce, complexity of multi-location operations and technological advances have led to a rise in the risks associated with candidate recruiting and contract staff/vendor hiring, he added.
Analysts feel that due to the rapid growth of IT/BPO services, overall employment opportunities have grown tremendously. On one hand their is the rising demand for talent while on the other there is a shortage of people with right skills which has put the placement agencies under pressure to identify candidates at short notices. As such, some candidates as well as recruitment agencies are faking information related to academic qualifications, experience, salary on the resumes.
The country's largest IT services provider TCS had recently asked over 10 employees to leave the firm for fudging resumes. Even Satyam had a year back conducted a background check and asked several employees to leave the organisation for submitting fake bio-datas.
Haunted by the problem, the IT firms are now hiring third party firms to conduct the checking before making a formal job offer.
Cognizants Chief People Officer T Sridhar said, "As the IT industry spawns ever more attractive job opportunities, verifying the credentials of prospective employees has become an imperative for inducting the right talent into the organization. Most organizations are increasingly resorting to third-party verification of the credentials of prospective employees."
SV Krishnan, the global HR head, Satyam Computer Services said "Since the company spends a lot of money in
training the fresh recruits we initiate a reference check well before an employee joins the organisation. In most cases, this process is completed prior to the employee joining us. If the reference check is negative for such employees, we ask them to leave the organization with immediate effect."
Its not only the big firms who had to tackle the challenge but small KPO and BPO firms are also facing the malaise of fake CVs.
KPO firm Smart Cube's Head- Human Resources Arundhati Raghavan said, "We believe that one in every four CVs is a fake or has gross misrepresentation of facts... Instead of a formal reference check process, our verification also involves speaking to the HR or Line Manager at the candidates former workplace.
Shoba Chetty, Director HR Impetus Technologies, which provides outsourced software product design, R&D and related services to leading global software product companies said "Our HR Department does a thorough reference check of the middle- to top-level candidates and gets the necessary certificates, experience letters from entry-level applicants.