Lockdown has seen a proliferation of fraud in the compliance and onboarding processes, with a 41% rise in ID fraud in 2020, and 53% of all job applications in the U.K. containing inaccurate information about a candidate’s prior experience or qualifications. Businesses need to adapt to the increasing frequency and sophistication of fake documents, particularly in the public sector where compliance, safeguarding and safer recruitment are so important and dominant in decision-making. The answer to this is, simply, technology.
As the co-founder of Talent Clouds, David Stone, explained in a recent webinar on the impact of the pandemic on onboarding and safeguarding in education, technology will be invaluable in combatting fraud in the future:
Extra Security is Needed
What this rise in fraud shows is that simply conducting DBS Checks as part of the pre-employment screening process is no longer enough for organisations to guarantee safer recruitment. With the shift to remote working brought on by the pandemic not going away, and the completion of checks with scanned documents that this has led to, it is clear the documents used need to be verified and identities confirmed if you will not actually see the original copies.
The technology available to do this not only allows you to conduct a variety of checks at the same time, with results returned as soon as they are confirmed rather than waiting for a paper certificate to arrive, but we also know it works, as has been shown by the reduction in time to turn around checks over the pandemic, when demand for public sector workers was high and there was a need to get them onboarded quickly.
How Technology Can Help
It is all very well saying technology can help, but how does it help? Talent Clouds’ platform employs facial recognition and compares it to an official photograph (such as a passport), and also verifies that the document being used is real. As well as this, we also confirm the candidate’s employment history and Right to Work.
Technology can also help your remote DBS and other checks by storing all the relevant information in one place. By doing this, not only does it make it easier to manage your workforce, but any discrepancies in information submitted and documents used can be spotted.
One of the many negative consequences of the past year has been the rise in fraudulent documents. This becomes especially problematic in sectors where safeguarding and knowing exactly who you are hiring is so important, and the continuing uncertainties over Brexit meaning gaining a Right to Work is more difficult.
Technology is the way forward for organisations to keep up with the ever-increasing and ever more sophisticated fake documents, especially when the need to perform background checks on employees quickly is so great at a time of stretched resources.
You can see the full webinar session by clicking here.
Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
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