Candidates Faking Experience: How to Find Out

Are you working in US IT Recruitment and tired of rejections of your submissions by clients because the profiles you were so sure about getting through were fake? If it makes you feel better, you are not alone. The market is flooded with fake profiles, mostly with non immigrant candidates. 

On one hand, every year thousands of fresh graduates are entering the market. They all are eager to start their career. On the other hand companies want to hire experienced people so that they can save on time and cost spent on training them. It’s a complex situation. What should a fresh graduate do to get the job? Many are tired of giving interviews and facing rejections due to absence of experience.

While working in US IT Recruitment, we came across many instances where candidates show fake experience on their profiles. Recent college graduates tend to go to employers who train them on different technologies and then try to get projects for them with fake experience. Some of them are lucky enough to get a job, but if they are not well versed with the technologies they can’t perform the desired task while project execution. Many of them get blacklisted because of this reason. 

These fresh graduates then go to the employers who guarantee them that they will get projects for them. The employers or vendors train these candidates on specific technologies and start submitting them for different positions with fake Resume. 

The interviews are taken by someone else who is experienced and then the fake candidate is delivered on the project. In this situation if the fake candidate is trained properly he will be able to deliver the project on time. But these candidates are not trained on all the technologies so gradually the client comes to know that something is fishy about this candidate and they release the candidate from project. The vendor company loses their face in front of the client and the Recruiter gets all the heat.  

You can’t catch each and every fake profile but using below 2 tips the ratio can be decreased.

·         Check the candidate’s year of birth (only the year) and add 20 to it. Usually in Asia a student completes his graduation in 20 years. E.g. If a candidate is born in 1990 he will complete his graduation in 2010 and in 2014 he will be having experience of 4 years. Now if a candidates profile shows experience of more than 4 years it might be because he did some projects during his internship. But anything more than 5 years is fake.

·         Ask the candidate for 2 professional references with their email ids (no free domain mails like Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail etc.) if he is genuine he will provide the same. Else you are free to let the candidate go. 

We always ensure that our team members to go in deep while screening profiles of the candidates. Take your time while screening the profiles. Ask proactive questions. Use Google if you need information on some technologies. Ask technical questions. Cross check the answers. It’s difficult to screen each and every profile in this high pressured environment but prevention is always better than cure. 
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Reference: http://goo.gl/zgvqNQ