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Reference Checking - recruitment

Always Check the Facts

When Maxine Carr (Soham murders) was about to be released earlier than the then Home Secretary thought she should the police charged her with several fraud and deception offences. While the most serious charges related to benefit fraud, five related to lying on her job application forms. I saw no report that her employers had complained to the police.

This could be a great new to way sidestep the rigours of achieving a fair dismissal when someone is not up to the mark. Forget all those structured warnings, suspensions and appeals. Just check their original application form. If you find they have not told the whole truth all you need do is make an anonymous call to crimestoppers. The boys and girls in blue will call round, feel their collar and you have a cast-iron case to sack them.

On a more serious note, not all employers are as rigorous as they should be at checking on recruits. Even if you do not accidentally hire an out-and-out crook or a murder accomplice, people who under-perform because they overstated their experience, or who mess up your pay structure because you matched an untrue salary, can seriously unsettle the existing staff.

In my experience, it is difficult for an applicant to hide anything serious without changing some hard facts. Check all the facts that were relevant to your decision to employ. Remember that you structured your interview around what you thought you already knew. If someone said they were a team leader in their last job you asked different questions than if they had merely been one of the team. A salary that seemed low for the job causes you to delve further, an inflated one might not. If someone in their thirties says they have a degree, that may have affected your decision. Their GCSE results probably did not.  

So what should you check? As a minimum: employment dates, job titles and relevant qualifications; salaries and benefits (I was in line for a good bonus is always one to check); nature and scope of responsibilities; broadly how successful they were and why they left. Periods of self-employment, or full-time study, are useful ways to hide periods of unemployment, incarceration or jobs that went wrong - so check those very carefully.

Nowadays there are many jobs where police and criminal record checks are required but you still need to check the main facts yourself. When they do start, and here is one for the really paranoid, check if the P45 confirms what they said they were earning.

Frank Hobson   

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