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The Truth About Hiring: Candidates May Lie. What Can You Do About It?

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The talent market today is cutthroat. With U.S. unemployment falling to 3.5%, employers are struggling to fill open positions with talented individuals.

It may be tempting in times like these to snatch up almost anyone with the right résumé, but employers should beware of the uninformed hiring decision. In a recent survey, 1 in 3 Americans admitted to lying about their work experience and dates of employment.  

Opinions vary on what’s causing the surge in employment-related fabrications. Wouldn’t the general hunger for talent give candidates less reason to fib? Maybe employers are simply more savvy in spotting false claims. Perhaps candidates are trying to game applicant tracking systems. Who knows? Whatever the cause, the trend toward résumé fictionalization is troubling.

As a result, organizations are taking greater care in evaluating candidates during interviews, through reference checks, and with comprehensive background searches.

The Many Benefits of Background Checks

Employers can regain their hiring confidence by incorporating powerful, accurate background checks into the candidate evaluation process. Searches can confirm the professional history a candidate has supplied, verify education, and look into criminal conduct, driving history, credit, and more. Any of these details can highlight possible omissions or falsifications in an application or résumé.

Additionally, access to comprehensive background information can spare HR professionals from acting like interrogators during the interview process, more focused on ferreting out evidence of falsehoods than assessing whether the individual is a good fit for the organization. Leaning more heavily on the background check to verify key points enables HR professionals to engage in probing conversations that result in better hiring decisions.

A high-quality background check is also a good alternative to social media searches, which some employers use to look into potential hires. Going online to research prospective employees can raise legal headaches and return “fake news” of its own, so a background check is actually a far more reliable option.

The Importance of the Right Provider

When dealing with deception, it’s especially important to work with the right background check provider. One key feature that sets Asurint apart is our ability to go beyond candidate-supplied information to structure a comprehensive search.

Here’s why that matters—most background search providers determine where to look for information about a candidate based on limited address information, often what they tell the employer. This can lead to a narrow search that overlooks important records.

Asurint, on the other hand, uses our proprietary IQLogics technology to find an individual’s complete address history, reported and unreported. We also surface other names the individual has used. This empowers us to pull more extensive information in our searches.

What’s more, we’ve integrated with court systems and state agencies across the country. It takes time to build these partnerships, and not every background check provider has done so. But it means we can gather information covering 85% of the U.S. population, and our reach grows by the day. Add in our National Criminal Information Bureau (NCIB) search capabilities, and we’re talking almost a billion recordsat our disposal.

Our technologies, partnerships, and search methodologies empower us to return more results, on average, than a traditional background search. And because we find the information a candidate didn’t point to, we’re more capable of turning up potentially disqualifying factors an employer most needs to know about.

Whether you want to confirm employment history, look into criminal convictions, or examine other details of a candidate’s past, we have a range of compliant, rapid-response background search solutions to consider. Simply contact us for a demo.

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