Are you an Employer who is all set to hire some fresh employees to give your business the much needed expansion. You could also be a recruiter hiring on behalf of your clients. Let us assume that you have finished the first round of candidate screening. You now have some good candidates and the task at hand is to cross check the information mentioned in the candidate’s CV. How do you do it? Online candidate background analysis is a very good option. Apart from that we have a very straight forward and highly accurate source of gathering information about the candidate, which we normally overlook.
The current or previous employer.
Yes they are the answer to all our questions about the prospective candidate. Since our would-be candidate has been with them for quite a some time they would know him better than any search engine. The practice in Industry is to send a small form, pre-filled with information provided by candidate, to be verified by the previous employer. Normally it is addressed to concerned HR personnel or the direct authority to which the Candidates was reporting to.
This method of background verification has some genuine advantages, eg :
- You could get the exact CTC.
- Information on Employee behavior and work style.
- Address and Guardians’ information.
- Would not allow the candidate to dishonor Notice Periods.
In some cases, candidates get fake letters and certificates done to scrap through the selection process. This method is hard to beat for fraud candidates. All you need to do is get the phone number of the concerned people talk to them about the process and ask them to spare some time and verify you little form.
It does not matter if you are a prospective employer or a background checking service provider, this is what you would normally do to begin with. You would Google up the name of your would-be employee. (When I say Google up I mean to search on Google, you could Bing it up or use some other search engine you prefer) Let us discuss today what could possibly be an effective way of gathering more information about your candidates using Google.
So you have the CVs short listed and its time to find out which one of them will do justification to your investment (salary). So you are planning to Google it up? Go ahead. Unless your candidate is named Barack Obama or Priyanka Chopra or some other celebrity you would quite easily find some results for the person you are looking for. This is assuming that your candidate has some sort of internet exposure. Adding place of residence or working to you’re the candidates name in the search box will give you better results.
So you have found the right set of results on Google. Normally you should either get the candidates home page / blog / twitter handle / Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile etc on top. These are excellent sources of personal information like the persons area of expertise and interest. Here is what you should keep an eye open for.
Area of Interest: It’s not likely that some one would blog about ‘Disabling Javascript on IE’ unless he is a developer or advanced internet user. You can also get an idea how up-to date is his knowledge about his field of work
Connections: You can see which other people are connected to your candidate. The more experts he is connected to the more advanced tasks he can handle. That is because in case of need he will try to reach out to these people.
Cyber Slacking: His profile updates and activities on social media portal will give you a clear idea of the amount of time spent by the candidate on such activates. If you are looking for a Internet Marketer then you might like it if your candidate spends an awful amount of time on Social Networks. On the contrary you might find it wasteful employment if are looking for a Programmer.
Testimonials and Recommendations: Networks like Orkut, LinkedIn and personal blogs of Candidates friends and colleagues could provide you with testimonials which are write beneficial for HR people.
Best part in this process is “Good people lead you to more of their kind”. This is one great part of social networking – even if you are not satisfied with the current candidate you could end up hiring one of his friends or connections.