4 Vital Strategies for Eliminating Dishonest Job Candidates
If you are an employer, what percentage of your job applicants do you think lie on their resumes? The answer may surprise even cynical employers. A survey by HireRight reports that a whopping 85% of employers discovered at least one lie on resumes submitted by job candidates. A HireRight study five years previously found that 66% of employers found lies on resumes, suggesting that more employers are finding lies on their resumes than in the past.
Job candidates’ lies during the hiring process range from claims of a degree from a prestigious university instead of their actual alma mater, to being proficient at skills they rarely use. While some job candidate lies may only minimally impact job performance, other lies on resumes can be much more damaging for a company: for example, hiring an employee who falsely claims to be skilled at a specific task can come at significant cost to employers. An unskilled employee may fail probation periods, perform poorly and spend hours on the job learning tasks they claimed to know well. What are some of the best ways employers can weed out deceitful candidates?
Use background checks
The most stringent way of weeding out deceptive candidates might be to conduct criminal background checks. What do employers look for in a background check? SHRM explains that background checks generally reveal “whether an applicant may be unqualified for a position due to a record of criminal conviction, motor vehicle violations, poor credit history, or misrepresentation regarding education or work history.”
Perform reference checks
Even employers who don’t perform background checks usually check references from previous employers as an important cautionary step before hiring a candidate. Go2HR reveals some of the reasons why it’s important not to omit the reference check step: “By conducting reference checks, you can avoid costs associated with failed probation periods and poor performance, which can impact your guests or clients and damage your image or reputation.”
Use a skills test
It may be easy for job candidates to figure out how to lie on a resume, but skills tests don’t lie. By including a skills test in a job application, employers may not weed out candidates who claim to have attended a different and more prestigious university than the one they actually attended; but they will certainly be able to distinguish candidates who are truly skilled at relevant employment tasks from candidates who are only pretending to have those skills. CNBC explains that employers who use “skills tests, etc., will be able to separate truthful from dishonest candidates, and candidates may burn themselves for future jobs.”
Try a skill-based job platform
An AI-based hiring solution, Geekbidz, allows job candidates to enter information about themselves, including skills, and then ranks these skills, skipping over the resume and interview stage completely. The platform then uses AI technology to pair each employer who uses the platform with a candidate whose skills best fit the job description. Employers can then invite the candidate for an on-the-job evaluation.
With Geekbidz, the entire hiring process takes place without ever using resumes or interviews. Geekbidz thus eliminates one potential source of deception in the hiring process--candidates who lie on resumes—while introducing a much more accurate, deception-free source of candidate information: skills-testing; and adding the possibility of an on-the-job evaluation for double protection against candidate deception.
Check and Double-check Job Candidates—and Don’t Forget Skills-Testing and Skills-Based Hiring Solutions
If you want your organization to escape the staggeringly high rates of candidate deception in the hiring process, you will certainly have to perform background checks and reference checks on candidates. However, don’t forget skills testing—and even better, skill-based hiring solutions that eliminate potential sources of deception—as an important part of the process of weeding out job candidate deception.
