Background Check for Freshers

The job market is abundant with opportunities and it has become difficult to find qualified resources at reasonable costs. Many companies have resorted to maintaining a few experienced employees while hiring freshers to handle additional work loads. However there seems to be trend of undermining the importance of background check for freshers.

Freshers don’t have any professional experience to show and are primarily hired based on their educational qualifications, presentability, and their performance in the interview. The HR manager has limited information to make a ‘hire-or-not’ decision. The presence of this limited information makes it even more crucial to have a background check done for a fresher.

The benefits of a background check translate to both short and long term gains for the company. A few of these benefits have been listed below.

Short-Term Gains:

1. Education Verification: This is the most critical information for hiring a fresher. An education validation ensures that the degrees are not forged and that the fresher has necessary qualifications to be trained for the job at hand.
2. Criminal Record Check: A criminal record check would ensure that the fresher being hired would add to the HR managers efforts to maintain a safe workplace environment. A clean criminal record check will allow the HR manager to make the hiring decision with more confidence.
3. Address Check: It is always safe to ensure that the residential information provided is correct. This holds truer for companies where the freshers are being hired to work on sensitive information. Freshers are new to the corporate environment and more likely to abscond, having a verified address would help track the candidate in case some essential information needs to be retrieved.

Long-Term Gains:

1. Easy to Promote: As a fresher grows into an experienced employee, the company would be more confident in promoting a candidate that has had his credentials verified. The pre-employment verification would put the minds of HR managers at ease when making a promotion decision.
2. Easy to Sell: The Indian job market is largely service based with a lot of companies working as back office for US clients. Most of the times the client requests for a team to be provided on a temporary basis. It is also likely that the client would like to carry out a background check on their end, for the assigned members. Having already done a pre-employment background check would keep the work force provider at ease.

As listed above the advantages of conducting background checks for freshers are many. Mandating background checks for all employees would help the company weed out undeserving candidates before they become part of the interview process. The verification of all candidate provided information would provide for quicker hiring and longer retention cycle.