Any employer who wants to bring new people into the company craves to choose people who can be given confidence, into whose hands you can leave a department, a team and a budget. To be sure that the choice is the best one, the employer may go with examining the professional background of the prospective employee.
Sometimes, due to lack of job opportunities, candidates tend to embellish their CVs and write things about their experience or accomplishments that are less true. Therefore, candidates can write in their CVs longer experience than they had in one or more jobs, to cover some work breaks.
Accordingly, a candidate could also mention in his resume performances he has not ever had, but which he wanted to have. Also, he can write he earned accreditations and certificates that he wanted to get and never succeed to get in reality.
Little lies or capital mistakes
All this, and more, can be revealed by a background check of the candidate, based on references from former employers or representatives of educational institutions. The candidate could pass the contact details of people who can provide references about him in his resume. But if not, the recruiter or potential employer may demand him to indicate a series of contacts that could provide more information about him.
The practice of checking the candidate’s past became a more and more used practice by Romanian employers, as the labor market is growing and bringing to contest a growing number of positions with great responsibility, requiring a high degree of confidence.
So it is not something uncommon for a candidate to be asked to show a list of people who could be contacted to provide references about him during the recruiting process. Typically, these checks do not necessarily aim to reveal some ugly things about his professional past, but clearly outlining a candidate’s profile and obtain information that is not always clear from the resume.
Superiors or subordinates: Who should you contact first?
A very important thing to note is that the people contacted to provide references should not necessarily be former superiors of the candidate, but can also be former subordinates. This option should not be neglected by employers since it can reveal many issues concerning one’s relationship with the team. Besides, a company might try to hide the real reasons for the departure of a manager, usually because of reputation issues. Instead, a former subordinate should not have reasons for which he would not offer an objective perspective on the relation he had with a former boss.
However, we should not see a candidate background check as a method of spying or verifying past mistakes. In reality, this is a method used in recruitment by the employer or recruiter, to ensure that they are choosing the most suitable candidate for a particular position.
BIA HR TEAM