So a question such as 'have you ever been refused credit?' should be answered with scrupulous accuracy. Even low- level employees are likely to have a credit check run against their name.
#Huntdown cheats professional
Scrutiny of CVs can go well beyond a person's professional and academic background. Now human resources departments are more vigilant because they know they are on the chopping block.' Mike Hartwell, a director of the executive search firm Sheffield Haworth, says: 'For years, financial services firms used to take people's CVs on trust. They now include finance directors and risk managers. The FSA has also widened the categories of 'approved persons' who need its permission to do certain jobs. If they fail to do so, they risk being fined or banned from working.
They place personal responsibility, for the first time, on executives to ensure that their staff are suitable for their jobs. The new FSA regulations, which came into force in December, are partly responsible for this changing attitude. But if it happened nowadays, he says, he might have fired him.ĭavid Spencer-Butler, managing director of Financial and Personnel Research, another firm that checks CVs, says: 'I think companies are less likely to be tolerant of lies and inaccuracies than they were a few years ago.' He decided to keep him, because he liked him. One managing director says that a few years ago he was appalled to discover that an existing senior employee who claimed to be an Oxford University graduate had never been near the place. Once an employer has discovered a problem with a CV, they must then decide what to do about it. People in financial services have backgrounds from all over the world, so we'll offer our opinion about a university in Australia, for example, that a UK employer might never have heard of.' Degrees at 2.2 level mutate into 2.1s with surprising frequency and sometimes a qualification from an impressive-sounding institution turns out to be the kind that you can buy for £50, perfectly legally, without opening a textbook.ĭavid McKay of PeopleRisk says: 'We are often proactive. Some candidates are caught out saying that they spearheaded a product launch, for example, when all they did was give advice from the sidelines.Īcademic qualifications are also a classic area for trying it on. In the same way the company checks out the exact nature of a person's job, this time by going to a line manager. PeopleRisk routinely checks how much a person was paid by the simple method of ringing up an HR manager, perhaps from a job many years in the past, and quizzing them about it. 'This is particularly true in financial services, where a bonus might mysteriously migrate from one period to another, to make the candidate look as highly paid as possible,' says Leworthy. Some people cannot resist the temptation to exaggerate their pay.
But the other half require further checking, which sometimes reveals deliberate lying.' 'Of those, half can quickly be shown to be innocent mistakes. One of them is PeopleRisk, whose chief executive Richard Leworthy, says: 'Material inaccuracies occur in about one CV in four. Most banks outsource the business of checking CVs to companies that specialise in the field. They don't seem to realise that we might check the smallest detail of their CV, even down to which month they left a company 15 years ago, and why they left.'
The head of human resources at a large private bank says: 'Some people who apply for jobs are naive.
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