送交者: 大胖星 于 2005-3-19, 04:54:04:
在简历里误导和一般的吹牛还是不同。这就是为什么西方国家有专门的商业公司来检查简历的正确与否。
CV "detectives" track down false claims
The Sunday Times - Financial Appointments
The days when job applicants ran little risk of getting found out for embellishing their qualifications-or even making them up-will soon be over as firms become more vigilant in checking details, writes Andrew Rogers.
ALL applicants paint a brighter picture of themselves on their CV. That is the art of writing one - making your previous jobs sound a little more glamorous. And while your university awarded you a 2:2 you deserved a 2:1, so why not put that? After all, it was decades ago and who is going to bother checking?
These days, however, employers are increasingly taking the trouble to check CV details - and with good reasons. The Association of Search and Selection consultants estimates that one-quarter of CV's contain false information, ranging from fudged dates to hide a career gap, to falsified identities to conceal a bad credit history or worse.
Karen Edwards, co-director of the Brighton-based Personnel Risk Management, which specialises in providing City firms with pre-employment vetting services, says: "In 25% of cases, something comes up. One week it was 57%."
Firms such as hers delve deeply to discover how truthful your CV is. As well as checking easy things such as your address, date of birth, employment history and membership of professional bodies, they can investigate your creditworthiness and provide information on other company interests you may have - directorships, bankruptcies and general financial probity. They will do a media search to see if you have appeared the newspapers and even check your O-levels.
Richard Hitchens, co-director, says CV checking is on the increase. "The organisations have their own reasons, but there's no doubt that they wish to know more about the people they're considering employing," he says.
Some employers are more vigilant because they have come to realise the scale of fraud in British firms. A study last year by Ernst & Young, the accountancy firm, found that two-thirds of companies in The Times Top 1000 had been the victims of fraud in the previous 12 months. Given the size of those companies, such a statistic is not surprising, but it is still alarming that in 80% of the cases the fraud was perpetrated by staff and in 20% of cases the worker had been with the company more then 10 years.
Debbie Beecroft, an associated at Ernst & Young's fraud-investigation group, says fraudsters often turn out to be long-serving, trusted workers who know the systems and procedures well enough to work them. Nevertheless, "what we see more and more in our investigations is that if pre-employment checking had been done comprehensively, the person wouldn't have been taken on in the first place", she says.
"What's most important is taking up references from past employers and doing it properly rather than sending them a bland letter and forgetting about it. For sensitive positions, we would recommend face-to-face meetings as a way of following up a reference."
Experts believe that the threat of American-style "negligent hiring claims" is having a big effect. This practice, recognised in some 30 states in America, makes employers liable for crimes committed by their workers even when committed outside the direct scope of employment.
Joanna Blackburn, senior employment lawyer at Mishcon de Reya, a leading law firm, says these American precedents can be used as persuasive arguments in Britain. In future it may become standard practice for firms to ask people for official certification of their criminal record.
At present criminal record checks are done by the police and mostly limited to workers of statutory bodies such as health and local authorities, schools and probation services who work with under-18's. Most individuals can get a copy of their record only by asserting their right under the Data Protection Act.
But within two years, any employer will be able to ask prospective workers to apply for a criminal record check. The new Criminal Records Bureau will carry out checks and issue different levels of certificate. The most common one will show only unspent convictions. But employers in sensitive areas and professions - including many financial occupations - will be entitled to ask candidates to acquire a more detailed certificate that will show both spent convictions and cautions.
Although employers will not be able to gain this information directly from the bureau without applicants' consent, Liberty, the civil-liberties pressure group, has warned that these certificates, once available, will quickly become a standard requirement for job applications.
Blackburn believes that criminal checks will take some time to become acceptable. "Asking candidates to prove they don't have a criminal record is quite an inflammatory thing to do", she says.
"But I believe it will rapidly become acceptable in financial jobs and in the City, where they are spending a lost of money already on pre-employment screening."
If all this makes you think twice about applying for a new job, be warned-you could still find yourself the object of investigation. Some employers are checking out their existing workers and the effect can be quite dramatic.
Edwards says: "One IT department was told it was going to be checked and there were 12 resignations in one week."