"I got placed in an MNC with a package of 8 LPA!" Sounds so fascinating to hear, doesn't it?

Well, this dream & dazzle of getting placed in MNCs & renowned tech-giants in the IT industry is one of the most sought-after career options in the present day. Students have strong determination & ambitions to get placed in well-known multinational corporations right from day 1 of college. This trend of fascination towards a corporate career in the IT industry has made the field cut-throat competitive over the years. Just marks or merit are not sufficient to land you a visa into the MNC world, you must showcase extra-ordinary skills & relevant industrial experience.

To stand these grounds, & to survive through the cut-throat competition, a huge number of candidates choose to walk through some unethical paths. This has given a rising trend of fake-experienced & under-skilled candidates to make their ways into MNCs via forgery. Getting your profile glorified with some industrial experience accelerates your preferability for the role. Doing this is as simple as updating some additional posts & pointers on your LinkedIn profile. However, such profiles are very common to catch during the background verification part of the hiring process.

Here today, we’d like to talk about a more recent & less familiar form of forgery that has hidden from the eyes of many background checkers as well. You would know when a candidate fake-posts about working at a certain company when the previous employer denies testifying for his experience. However, what’d you do if the previous employer confirms the experience & candidature of the applicant? Here’s the catch though – THE PREVIOUS EMPLOYER DOES & DOES NOT REALLY EXIST!

He exists on paper & has a legitimate legal & digital presence but is not a functional firm at all. In the recent couple of months, many such fraud & money-laundering firms have been exposed by background verification agencies like Reliable Verify. These establishments are just namesakes with enough paperwork, human resource & digital presence to build legitimacy & credibility. They charge applicants seeking jobs in MNCs to pay them for getting fake skills/experience certificates & to testify on the background check process for them. The most common baits for these fake firms are

1. Students/Fresher with sub-par profiles to be selected in MNCs.

2. Candidates with no job experience & no relevant justification to explain the gap between their graduation & period of application.

3. Candidates with prior industrial experience, but in a niche/role different than the one that they are applying for.

4. Surprisingly, there also exists a 4th category of super-experienced candidates that have worked multiple jobs before applying to any said MNC, even concurrently or simultaneously. This experience may or may not be practically relevant to the role that they’re seeking but cannot be disclosed regardless.

• Did you know that this phenomenon of working under multiple employers at the same time is known as “moonlighting” & can really downgrade your chances of getting into an MNC. Candidates who indulge in moonlighting are deemed to be a threat to the firm in terms of sharing/leaking the data, resources, or client engagements of one employer to the other. Compromised productivity is another downside of moonlighting which drives employers away.

Thus, the candidates practicing moonlighting choose to hide their experience with any of their actual employers & shake hands with the fake firms to get them a decent & preferable document of experience.

• How To Unravel These Fake-Companies & Moonlighting Candidates :

For starters, a more diligent & Reliable verification process, of course!

However, there are legitimate red flags to look out for, which can help you identify the impostor employers. One such fool-proof measure is UAN verification via EPFO. Applicants provide consent to employers/BGV firms on or before onboarding to run UAN verification checks on them which discloses all their previous employment/employers from where they have received a PF amount.

If the employee profile is shady, one or both of these revelations are bound to come out through the UAN verification:

1. The employee is working under multiple employers simultaneously, which implies that he is indulged in the practice of moonlighting.

2. The employee has not received a penny of PF from the previous employer in the mentioned tenure of employment under him, which implies that the experience is testified by a fraud firm.

The practice of creating fake experience documents is deemed as a criminal offense & is punishable under the Indian Penal Code. The legality of the practice of moonlighting is subject to the terms & clauses mentioned in the employment agreement presented by the current and/or past employer(s).

Lately Wipro sacked more than 300 employees due to Moonlighting. Accenture terminated several of its employees who were caught using fake experience or skill certificates to get a job at that company.

So the next time, any acquaintance of yours even considers taking such short-cuts to land into big companies, WARN THEM, for this might even pump the brakes on their careers forever.