police verification as part of background checks before hiring is becoming so vexing for companies that some are giving it up altogether while others are trying out alternatives.
Online retailers, including Amazon India and Flipkart, and software firms, among them Symphony Teleca and Nest Software, have asked staffing companies not to carry out police verification checks at the time of hiring. This is because these police verification checks do not offer “value addition” to the employers, people familiar with the matter said although the companies themselves declined to come on record.
Others such as Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays, when scouting to hire talent for their back-office facilities, ask third-party recruitment firms to opt for “court-room” checks than the traditional police certificates as it is more consistent.
“A court-room check is more reliable as it gives complete information on any criminal case filed against any individual who is applying for a job,” said Guru Prasad Srinivasan, director of staffing at Ikya Human Capital Solutions, a Bangalore-based staffing firm.
“Court-room checks are more reliable as any case registered against an individual can be accessed by any other state official,” said Srinivasan. Although most companies continue to rely on police verification when hiring permanent employees, staffing firms maintain that on account of longer waiting time — usually 4-6 weeks — and corruption at police departments, companies have started looking at other available options.
“Financial sense, cumbersome processes and a host of other reasons make the police verification unviable, without offering real value-addition,” said Asim Handa, CEO at staffing company Gi Group India.
This news comes at a time when staff background checks are becoming increasingly important in the US after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency asked financial companies to thoroughly scrutinise the outsourcing vendors to minimise risk of fraud.
“They (the regulators) are recognising that a vendor’s risk profile also depends on the people actually performing the services,” Stuart Levi, a partner responsible for outsourcing negotiations at US corporate law firms Skadden, Arps, Meagher & Flom, said. “Many vendor issues that come up today in India and globally are the result of rogue employees and they want to make sure that companies have a good employee base to work with.”
For now, the country’s leading Information technology companies, including TCS, Infosys and Wipro, continue to ask for police verification checks but many staffing firms said that the software providers are “unhappy” with the data shared after the police checks.
“In some of our engagements with Wipro, the client has asked us to get courtroom checks (rather than police check),” said the head of a Bangalore-based staffing company. Wipro and HCL Tech maintain that they continue to have mandatory police checks as part of the hiring process. IT industry lobby Nasscom acknowledges the shortcomings in the current system and said that it has increased scrutiny of all the 18 empanelled companies that recruit employees and provide background verification checks.
