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Organizations Need to Invest in a Background Screening Provider to Ensure They Hire the Best Candidate

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Vivek Khanna, Managing Director, India Region, First AdvantageHave you ever questioned your decision of hiring a person? Or, have you ever hired a candidate but regretted your decision later on?

In a country like India, where the population is growing at a rapid pace, the competition and the fight to get employed has become quite aggressive. Everybody wants to be financially secure to be able to survive and provide for family. This motivates people to even take recourse to unfair means including providing forged documents to increase their chances of getting hired. This in turn amplifies the risk of a bad hire by a company, if it lacks an effective background screening process.

Social media screening though convenient can be more effective if backed up by stringent screening of criminal background, employment history, educational qualifications and the talent and skills actually possessed by the candidate


Employees are an integral part of any company which indicates that they are an important investment made by the company as well. An excellent team of highly qualified and skilled workers can be the driving force of a company’s success. Thus, selecting a candidate who will be the right match for a company is an important aspect of hiring. The candidate should not only be familiar with the quality and the method of work that the company delivers, but should also act as a fit representative of the company’s values and ethics to be able to uphold its goodwill. In fact, global recruiting leaders have cited quality of hire as a top priority. Whether a candidate will turn out to be an asset or a liability depends on the hiring process strategy. This implies the necessity to invest in a reliable background service provider that can assist in selecting the right candidate amongst many.

Nowadays, most Indian companies, especially start-ups and MSMEs prefer economically convenient background screening, treating the entire process as just a mere formality, thus diverting from its entire purpose and many a times, end up hiring the wrong candidate for the company.

Pre-employment social media screening is a growing trend in the recruitment process. By checking out information on websites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Flickr, recruiters can learn a lot about a candidate.
They can gauge personality, professionalism, company culture fit, qualifications, and communications skills – all valuable information you want to know before adding someone to your team.

While this process is time-efficient and cost-effective, a lot of issues crop up relating to:

• Authenticity: There is no guarantee that the information posted on the candidate’s profile is 100% authentic and reliable. It also includes a high possibility of misconstrued images, messages or other data posted by someone with a similar name. One of the most common issues faced in the virtual world is hacking. There’s also a potential for an HR professional to find an impostor account and mistake it for a valid one
• Social media is seen upon as personal space by many. They interact casually with their friends and other people, hence, it is not an assurance of their behavior when in an office
• Social media screening becomes invalid when social media accounts are highly secured and private
• Legal issues regarding hiring judgment made on the basis of caste, culture, gender, religion tend to crop up most while social media screening

Social media screening though convenient can be more effective if backed up by stringent screening of criminal background, employment history, educational qualifications and the talent and skills actually possessed by the candidate. These checks have become absolutely necessary with the increase in the rate of discrepancies in India. In fact, the Q1 2019 “First Advantage Trends Report: India” states the discrepancy rate for the first quarter of the year stands at 9.2 percent with Bangalore leading the highest discrepancy rate in India under employment and address. The northern part of the country, on the other hand, leads in the discrepancy rates related to education check. A dependable background screening provider can ensure that social media screening is carried out accurately to provide a good deal of job-related information to help you make smarter hiring decisions.

An effective background screening service provider may cost a bit more, but it should be seen as a fruitful investment as they provide an unbiased screening of credentials and assist the HR in making the right choice. Some of the major benefits provided by a dependable background service provider are:

• A sound and effective screening process involves scanning the candidate’s background thoroughly, which might lead to the discovery of the applicant’s thoughts and values, providing meaningful insights to the company
• An effective screening service doesn’t discriminate or highlight information based on a person’s caste, gender, age, sexuality but provides only valuable and necessary information to the company
• A thorough screening process is required to identify discrepancies, in order to pick out the most genuine and the right candidate, especially when the rate of discrepancies in India is increasing with time
• A sound background service provider would also act as a protective measure against lawsuits caused by negligent hires
• A reliable background screening provider also offers services tailored as per the requirements of different companies

In a country, where news of forged documents and certificates are getting published almost every other day, the importance of hiring a dependable background service provider should not be belittled. A reliable background screening provider forms the backbone of the company’s process of hiring the best and the most suited candidate. Investing in such a service is equally important, and should be considered just that - a good investment.