Gurgaon-based AuthBridge conducts  pre-employment background screening during the process of recruiting and helps organizations minimize legal complications companies. Co-founder and CEO, Ajay Trehan, shared his views on the industry with Manoj Ahuja Excerpts:

How different is the risk and talent management in India when compared to the international companies?

India is just waking up to risk management. Till recently most organization who were using our service were Indian operations of global multi-national organization or organizations that were providing extensive services to global multinational organization. Things are changing now with more and more Indian organizations and some of them very small and owner driven as well using our services. It will not be an overstatement if I was to stay that whoever has had a bad experience will not say no to working with a service provider like us. And there are other who will learn from others experience. And finally the ones who will learn with time. I remember being taught subjects like plant safety etc during my IIT days and how extensively ICI (where I worked for over five years) used to focus on safety. That was manufacturing industry; in today’s service-dominated economy risk takes a different manifestation-Risk from employees.

Is telling lies and fudging documents to get a job common in India?

AuthBridge works closely with some of the largest employers in the country. On an average we notice that 25 per cent of the CVs that we get have one lie or more. It would not be an exaggeration to state that fudging and lying in resumes is quite rampant.

Witch sector are more susceptible to employee fraud?

I do not thing that people lying on their resumes in most cases have any thing other then getting a job on their mind. It is therefore not relevant witch function or what kind of industry they get into – they just want a job and just take this extreme step as they feel that is their only way to success. Because of its sheer nature, service sector is very people intensive and therefore more susceptible to such frauds. Various studies globally have shown that employee are responsible for perpetrating almost half of the frauds that happen in an organization trends in India will be the same at the least if not any worse.

What kind of difficulties do you encounter while verifying a prospective employee’s past?

The biggest challenge that the background screening industry in India faces currently is lack of any reference databases and also more basically the lack of any unique nation wide identification. There is no centralized criminal record bureau that one can go to for screening criminal records of an individual. Agencies like us therefore have to work with police department across the country. Witch is a time consuming and manual process. Similarly there is no central repository of address have resided in and that makes the address verification process very manual and hence challenging. Over the next few years, the Industry will evolve to database driven verification and things will look better then.

What kind of awareness are there among the HR people in India about pre-employment background screening and risk management?

I thing the level of awareness regarding pre-employment screening and risk management is quite high among the HR people in India. Some know about these as they are using service provider like us and others know it as organizations like us contact them seeking information about there previous employees. Over the last few years lot of resources and time have been spend by AuthBridge also in reaching out to HR managers across the country directly or through various forums and explaining to them the relevance of pre-employment screening and risk management.

How does pre-employment screening help to companies?

Imagine hiring someone who has been known to be involved in data theft in his previous organization for managing yours customers data imagine hiring a dubious sales person as a part of the launch team for a new product; imagine hiring an absconding criminal in your administration or accounts department. If you thing these situations trouble you, Pre-employment screening will more then help. The whole process of employee background screening has been built to help organizations take better and more informed hiring decision. The process will cost less then 0.5 per cent of the money spends in hiring This person but then the return on investment as almost immediately. Even a single episode of white-collar crime can erode years of work done for building a brand.

Source: Hindustan Times