While reading an article from Computerworld Magazine, regarding scams during virtual interviews, an unnamed company recently interviewed an applicant to fill a key position as a senior engineer specializing in a popular open-source software. The candidate sailed through three rounds of interviews “with flying colors”, as told by Computerworld magazine. They offered him the position, he accepted and went through the onboarding process. When the new hire showed up for his first real virtual meeting, it was not the same guy! Computerworld stated, “He literally wasn’t the person they’d interviewed. He didn’t look the same, didn’t talk the same, and most important of all, he didn’t have the job skills they needed.”
What happened to this company is called the bait-n-switch, which simply means that a skilled interviewee gets a different person the job by interviewing really well and showing great skills. Once hired a different person is doing the work, but probably not very well. After reading this our company had one thought, simply use a background screening company. A proper background screening would have stopped this situation in the first place. Background screenings consist of securely transferring information from identity validation, county criminal searches, name alias searches, multi-state criminal searches, federal criminal searches, social media screening, 50 state sex offender registry searches and many more services.
After reading more into the article, here are some ideas of ways to prevent this from happening.
- Ask for a photo ID during the virtual interview
- Compare the ID with the actual person interviewing for the position
- Do part of the interviewing process in person before a decision is made
To have virtual interviews makes it easy to hire personnel who lives in another state or far from the HR office. However, this process has its problems.
Using a thorough background screening company like ACUTRAQ Background Screening, Inc, gives you the option to choose what information you need based on your company’s needs. There are reasonable pricing packages for an array of different services.
Background screening companies keep you safe from scammers, like fraudulent applicants and criminals of many different kinds. In choosing background screening for every applicant, your company is staying safer while hiring the best choice of applicants. You can be assured they are who they say they are. Having that reliability and trustworthiness in your employees can only make your own company more successful.
