The success of just about any business is highly dependent on the quality of the company's staff. A strong human resources department is essential in the development of that staff. As unemployment continues to rise around the world many human resource departments are becoming overwhelmed with the amount of resumes they have to sift through in order to find competent applicants. Technology, such as pre-applicant screening, has helped curtail some of that but it cannot account for increasingly desperate applicants who might be willing to pump up their resume to get noticed. Resume dishonesty is a big problem for any human resource department and it's getting worse as people are becoming more and more desperate to stand out from the crowd.
One way to combat issues with resume dishonesty is to use employment background screening services. These services reach out to companies on behalf of the human resource department to confirm things like dates of employment, salary history, and job title and duties as well as education verifications. These services can be implemented after the initial qualification screening (often automated) and before the applicants get to the hiring representative.
CareerBuilder.Com published a survey where 8% of workers said they had fudged their resume in some way while 49% of employers, in the same survey, said they had found applicants stretching the truth in some way on their resumes. 57% of those employers said they immediately disqualified those applicants.
Over the past few years the ability to either pre-screen out unqualified applicants or filter them out on a background check has increased significantly. Advances in technology, viewing the social media profiles of potential employees for data discrepancies, and advanced background checking services have all contributed to the ability of human resources departments to filter out unqualified applicants. Many of the technologies used are becoming less costly as they become more automated so the future appears brighter for those smaller companies who can't quite afford the technology right now. It is still a difficult task because some companies cannot afford these measures and when that is combined with the increased applications being received HR departments still have difficulty in making sure they are hiring the right candidates.