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Running checks…. it’s easier than you think

This week I’ve been recruiting for a contract Project Support Officer role, as part of the requirements I’m checking people out not only for their ability to do the job advertised but also is their information on their CV correct.  In other words, are there any porkies on there that I should know about.

In a small sample of just 5 people who have applied for the position, 4 of them are not telling the whole truth, that’s a whopping 80%! It took just five minutes of running a few checks on the internet to establish whether the people were who they say they were.

So, I bet you’re really interested to hear about what people have been caught out lying about right?

The easy one, if you put that you’ve taken any of the OGC accreditated courses like PRINCE2, MSP etc there is an online register that shows exactly when you did it and where. That accounted for the first of our candidates. The second, states that he’s currently working for a company as a project support officer currently supporting a senior project manager. What he omitted to tell me was the company he currently works for is actually his own and its been dissolved for the last 12 months. It’s easy to find out details about companies and directors either from Companies House directly or any of the credit checking facilities. The third, has been working for the same company for the last 5 years, a company I’ve never heard of. Briefing checking out the company online bought no clues and delving deeper it was easy to find out that actually it hasn’t existed for the last two years. Finally, and this one is really the best of all. The fourth candidate is someone who has applied for a number of roles at Arras People over the last two years. The systems we use here enable us to keep previous versions of the CV used when applying for jobs, a bit like an archive. When I received the latest application I took a quick look at the previous versions, just to see if they were the same. Unfortunately some editing fairy must have been at work because the latest CV bore no relation to the previous versions, in fact he had invented an entire works history up.

There is a moral to this story which I’m sure doesn’t need spelling out, but in this day and age of technology and online presence it’s making it easier and easier to find out about people at the click of a mouse.

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