Many job aspirants give fake educational documents: Study

MUMBAI: In the first study of its kind in India, an employee background screening company has found that among the job aspirants who cheat, nearly 85 percent resort to giving fake educational documents.
First Advantage specialises in background screening for 90,000 companies globally. It will make public its first 2008 quarterly report pertaining to the kind of "frauds candidates and employees perpetrate to acquire or retain a job". First Advantage managing director (West Asia) Ashish Dehade told media that the report "will be made public early next week". Declining to reveal the percentage of people who cheat, he said it was "very high".
Talking about the sudden interest of corporates in seeking background screening of potential candidates, Dehade said that in recent times, "we are witnessing a massive discrepancy and a high growth of risks in candidate recruitment and contract staff or vendor hiring".
"One of the reasons why many candidates manage to get away with spurious credentials and documents is because jobs are multi-located. In simple words, jobs are not confined to one region or state or country," he said. "Thus it becomes very easy for a person to get away with forged documents and fake claims."
The findings of the 2007 study had come as a shock to firms and their human resource managers. "And in our 2008 first quarterly report, we have found that almost all industry sectors witnessed an increase in both employment and education related discrepancy as compared to the previous quarter."
Dehade said the fraudulent practices are not confined to just one sector, "it permeates almost every arena, be it banking or health".
The discrepancies were also found enveloping other facets of candidates.
For example, it was found that 21 percent of the candidates had inflated their previous designations, 44 percent had given an incorrect tenure and 21 percent had provided false employment information like incorrect company name, employment status and reasons for leaving.