EmployeeScreenIQ Blog

It seems that our friends across the pond have some major issues on their hands.  It appears that over 7000 CONVICTED criminals applied to become teachers last year.  The Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) provides background checks to the schools but has no idea how many of them were hired.

CRIMINAL CLASSES: JOBS FOR EX-CONS

NEARLY 7,000 convicted pedophiles, killers and kidnappers applied to become teachers last year.

The Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) revealed brothel keepers, flashers, child beaters and drug dealers were also among those after classroom jobs.

Last night Secretary of State for Children Ed Balls demanded an investigation after the disturbing figures were released under the Freedom of Information Act.

They showed 6,750 of the 248,220 people who applied for classroom jobs last year had criminal records.

They included two who had taken indecent photos of children and four convicted of manslaughter. The CRB carries out checks for employers on job candidates who may be unsuitable to work with children or other vulnerable people.

But a Home Office spokesman admitted they had no figures to show if any of them landed teaching jobs.

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Hotels in India and many other countries are beginning to embrace the concept of employment background investigations.  The Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai India and others will begin background checks on various staff, and long term guests.  This move comes after terrorists took siege of the Taj Mahal hotel and held employees and guests for several days.  Over 132 people were killed and hundreds more were injured in these well coordinated attacks spanning across the city of Mumbai.

The full article can be found at:

Rattled hotels start screening employees

Our thoughts are with the families of the victims of this horrible tragedy.

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Dubai’s Health Authority (DHA) has suspended the medical license of a physician currently under investigation for causing the death of a patient in the United Kingdom.  Dr. Mitra Nikkhah has been charged with manslaughter caused by gross negligence in the death of an elderly patient.  Dr. Nikkhah allegedly prescribed penicillin to the patient despite being told by his wife he was allergic to the drug.  A month after being charged with the crime, Dr. Nikkhah had relocated to Dubai and had begun practicing medicine there.  DHA had not performed a background check or a license verification on the doctor before granting her a medical license.  The DHA now affirms that they will conduct background checks and license verifications on all incoming physicians and all physicians currently working in the country.

According to this article, this isn’t the first time DHA had granted a medical license to a physician who had previously lost his license in the U.K.  So, why didn’t they think to check backgrounds and verify licenses back then?

Fool me twice, shame on me!

Officials to investigate physicians’ histories

By Mitya Underwood, The National – November 18, 2008

DUBAI // Health officials revealed plans to conduct background checks and verify the licence of every medical professional working in the emirate.

The announcement coincides with the trial in the UK this week of a Dubai-based doctor accused of killing a patient by giving him the wrong medication.

The Dubai Health Authority (DHA) said it would follow closely the criminal case against Dr Mitra Nikkhah, who was apparently practising in Dubai a month after she was charged in the UK. It has already suspended Dr Nikkhah’s licence and said it would take further action against her if necessary.

The DHA said it had been planning the background checks before Dr Nikkhah’s case came to light. The checks are to include examining employment records.

They will be incorporated in a four-year overhaul of the emirate’s healthcare system begun in June, under which about 15,000 medical professionals will be required to reapply for their licences.

Dr Nikkhah, 41, was working as a locum GP in a health centre in Plymouth, England, in May 2006 when she allegedly prescribed penicillin to an elderly patient, despite being told he was allergic to the drug.

The patient, David Townsend, 73, went into anaphylactic shock and died, the Plymouth Crown Court heard at the start of her trial on Monday.

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It appears that we in the US have exported yet another hot commodity to those in India: Resume Fraud.  In a recent article posted on ERE, author Raghav Singh sheds some light on just how rampant this practice has become.

“A recent study by KPMG found that about 60% of employers complain about resume fraud and fake credentials among significant numbers of applicants. Five percent of companies have reported losses exceeding $2 million as a result. The situation is such that many universities are now starting to embed RFID chips in their diplomas to prevent fraud.”

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How does this information compare to our numbers in the US?  employeescreenIQ research shows that 56% of the verifications that we conduct (employment and education) contain some type of discrepancy between what the applicant reported and what the employer indicated.  In a recent survey, we found that nearly 10% of job applicants make false assertions about their academic accomplishments.  So to answer the question above about how the findings in India compare to us in the US, the answer is simple: there is no difference.

How do we explain this phenomenon?  There are two factors that I believe play into this developing trend in India.  First, many people witnessed what career advancement (translation: money and power) could do for their lives.  Second, there are more people competing for fewer jobs.  What better way to stand out from the crowd by embellishing your credentials.

Just like in the US though, employment screening is becoming mainstream in India today.  By exercising proper due diligence through tools like Employment and Education Verifications, organizations can make more informed hiring decisions which will ultimately reduce their exposure to this emerging trend.

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As a condition for the Republic of Korea to join the United States’ visa waiver program, both countries have signed an accord that would allow for the exchange of criminal records of those traveling to the other country.  According to Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Paul A. Schneider, “This agreement will enable law enforcement officers on both countries to share information to combat crime and enhance our ability to prevent criminal and terrorist travel.”  The types of criminal records shared between the two countries include convictions for serious crimes where the traveler spent a year or more in jail.

GREAT idea.  But I’d be very interested to know how the Department of Homeland Security intends to identify the criminal records of these travelers.  As many of you know, there is no one reliable national database for criminal records. In fact, if you combined all national criminal records databases together into one database, it still wouldn’t house all of the information from every court in the U.S. and even if it did, the accuracy is questionable.  I doubt the DHS will be doing a county criminal search on each traveler to Korea as that could be costly and time consuming.  So, how will the DHS effectively pull this off?  How will Korea?

I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed…

South Korea, US Sign Accord on Criminal Data Exchange

Yahoo! Asia News – November 10, 2008

SEOUL, Nov. 10 Asia Pulse – South Korea and the U.S. signed an accord on exchanging criminal records of visitors to each other’s country on Friday, ahead of South Korea’s inclusion into the U.S. visa waiver program slated to take effect on Nov. 17, Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said Sunday.

The accord on criminal data exchange was signed by South Korean ambassador to the U.S. Lee Tae-sik and Paul Schneider, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in a ceremony in Washington, said the ministry.

The agreement calls for the two sides to share personal information on those who have received a more than one-year jail term for such grave crimes as murder, rape, robbery, deception, arson and human trafficking.

The ministry has said it will ask the National Assembly to ratify the accord later this week.

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The Canadian Criminal Records Bureau or CRB’s system for criminal records is not without flaws.  This is the system primarily used by Canadian employers to conduct background checks.

Wrong name! Trainee is accused of assault

A STUDENT nurse could be kicked off his course after a check by the Criminal Records Bureau wrongly accused him of assaulting an 11-year-old boy.

David Williams, 45, was due to start a placement at Meldreth Manor School as part of his course at Anglia Ruskin University but is having to defer his place after he was wrongly said to have assault convictions which are in the name of another David Williams.

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According to Human Resource Executive Magazine the need for international recruiting is going to explode.  In the United States we are experiencing a massive nursing shortage.  According to the Baltimore based Center for Nursing Advocacy, the US is projected to have a shortage of 275,000 nurses by 2010.  HR Executive writes an interesting article;  RX for International Recruiting.  Currently there are no standards for recruiting nurses internationally.

And the United States is not alone, according to Patricia Pittman, executive vice president of Washington-based AcademyHealth, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on health research and policy.

“It’s really impossible to compete with salaries in the United States,” says Pittman, who estimates that a nurse can earn up to 10 times their salary in the source country.

This is creating some big issues across the globe.  Unethical recruiters see huge dollar signs and are doing everything they can to bring nurses to the US.  Recruiters in India and the Philippines seem to be taking advantage of this and are using unethical means to recruit talent.  According to HRE in order to respond to the problem, a code of ethics for recruiting foreign-educated nurses was recently unveiled at the National Press Club in Washington by a task force of health care professionals, attorneys and recruiters, among others.

What does this mean to you?  Make sure you are doing background checks on your recruiters and nurses.  International Background Checks or Global Background Screening services are available and should be utilized in all cases.  Make sure your foreign recruiters are adhearing to ethical standard and not putting your orgainization at risk.

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Be wary of who you are hiring!  When hiring someone from a foreign country a title of “doctor” can mean many things.   Utilizing a solid global screening or international screening program is more important than ever.  Simply verifying a professional license or checking the equivalency of a license could make a big difference.  Imagine the embarrassment of hiring a doctor only to find out he is a doctor of nothing!

Highly “Educated” Dictators of Tehran

The fiasco of the clumsily forged Oxford doctoral diploma of the Iranian interior minister is comically tragic. Unfortunately for the interior Minister Ali Kordan, he will not be able to join the elite group of Dr. Ahmadinejad, Dr. Larijani, Dr. Khatami, Dr. Maleki, Dr. Rezaii, Dr. Motaki, Dr. Jajili and a thousand other officials with a PhD degree any time soon. However this debacle raises the question, why Tehran´s rulers feel the need to carry the title of “Doctor” to govern?

More than anyone else, these inept executives are conscious of their own incompetence. Most of them have climbed up the same four step career ladder: Revolutionary Guard, prosecutor/torturer/executioner, provincials governor, city mayor or division director, and finally minister/MP/president. Their busy vocational path has left little time for learning skills needed to run the government. Purchasing a PhD diploma has been the logical choice for these rulers to purge intellectuals and educated workforce, and place themselves better to rip off the county´s wealth.

The popularity of the doctoral title among the theocratic dictators is also due to the ill reputation and disgrace associated with religious titles such as “Hojatoleslam” and “Ayatollah” among people. Such religious titles in Iran are now symbols of demagogy, brutality, and despotism.

For those officials who are engaged in interactions with the international communities , such as nuclear negotiation teams, or ambassadors, the doctoral title is used to conceal insincerity and deceitful intents and cunning tactics.

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‘PRIVACY ISSUE’: The company that cloned five pit bulls for a woman who was accused of kidnapping said its services could play a part in stabilizing customers

“There was no reason to check her background.”

A South Korean cloning company said yesterday it had no plans to screen its future customers, despite a scandal involving a US client accused of abducting a man decades ago.

Ra Jeong-chan, the head of Seoul-based RNL Bio, said he was unaware of the criminal records of Bernann McKinney, accused of kidnapping a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave.

Bernann McKinney gained widespread prominence recently when she had RNL clone five pups from her beloved pit bull, Booger. The firm claims that the puppies, for which McKinney paid US$50,000, represent the first successful commercial cloning of a canine.

But the intense media coverage of the event also helped expose the 31-year-old mystery.

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India, one of the largest pools of IT professionals in the world is seeing an increased need for background checks.  One of the reasons we launched employeescreen University was to educate employers across the globe on the virtues of doing proper employee background investigations.  One bad hire can cost your company millions in lost revenue and a lot of embarrassment.  Global background checks or “international background screening” is a growing trend. (Read employeescreenIQ 2009 Trends).

This story is a perfect example of why organizations need to tighten up their hiring practices.

IT Firms Have No Place for a Fake Resume

The IT-BPO industry is becoming increasingly clear that a fake resume can cost you your job with India’s largest IT serivces provider, Tata Consultancy Service (TCS), being the latest to recently ask close to 20 employees at its Kolkata centre to leave. The company, during the background verification, found that these employees have used fudged resumes to get jobs.

In the recent past all the major IT firms including Infosys, Satyam and Wipro Technologies and many mid-cap firms have taken a hard stand on fake or fudged resumes. However, the incidents continue. First Advantage, a leading background screening firm, in its recent report states that 30 per cent of all the resumes they have screened have discrepancies. In 2006-07 the company screened over 2 million applicants across industries. Ashish Dehade, managing director (West Asia), First Advantage says, “The percentage has been increasing. In 2006 it was 16-17 per cent, for 2007 its was 30 per cent and while we are just six months into 2008 the percentage is around 30 per cent.”

TCS is not the only firm doing this. Earlier Infosys had asked close to 100 employees to leave in FY07 due to discrepancies found in the resumes. Same goes for Satyam and Wipro Technologies. Some time back it was reported that Wipro would be sharing with other IT firms the database of job applicants who have faked information in their CVs.

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