The ability to establish trust in business defines growth today. Given the industry insights, major Indian organisations are hitting a wall when it comes to background verifications. There’s a vision and a showpiece strategy, but a lack of trust to achieve it.
Background checks in India are convoluted because of the various intricacies involved in the process. While more and more companies continue to adopt the ritual, close to one-fourth of Indian businesses slip into misapprehensions regarding their employee data. Results are either too little, poorly drafted, inaccurate or received too late.
Employer Disregard: There’s a term for this in the corporate book: Negligent Hiring. In 2014, a Florida based IT Firm was ordered by the court to pay a hefty compensation to a client who sued one of their employees for misconduct during a meeting. Testimony at the trial revealed that the company had failed to conduct background verification on the accused employee, who had been fired from three previous jobs. (Source: SHRM)
Screener Misfeasance: If you approach one of those run-of-the-mill verification companies that rely on tedious, traditional methods of screening, it’s bad news. Screeners sometimes take the easy way out. Preferring profit over precision, they tend to contribute to the numbers of wrongly cleared. In 2020, a high-ranking New York City education official was federally charged with child crime. Even though he had been employed for four years, his background checks had not yet been done. (Source: Live Mint)
HR Burnout: Due to significant employee turnover and low strength, industries such as retail, manufacturing, finance, and BPO frequently bypass background checks. In India, many small and medium-sized businesses are under pressure to fill positions rapidly while ignoring comprehensive investigation.
The Verification Dilemma: For a typical business, touchpoints are many. Most organisations fail to decode the required set of checks for a particular business objective, resulting in discrepancies in one or more points of contact. In 2022, a UK company faced significant monetary loss due to insider fraud committed by one of its employees. While the accused was made to undergo a basic ID verification before hiring, there was no criminal data on him as the checks were requested but languished in a backlog. (Source: Live Mint)
