cFIRST Background Checks - Our Journey So Far

We started as a team of 20 people, more than 20 years back in a garage in Bangalore, is now a unit of 400+ passionate individuals who come together to achieve the dream Mr. Viral Vora had dreamt of 20+ years back. While Mr. Viral was in the United States of America, as an Engineering student, he learnt the anguish of companies and what they went through during the process of hiring and the repercussions of a wrong hire. 

Legal mitigations, loss of face and brand name, futile capital investment and cost to company as a part of the hiring process, combined with frustration made Mr. Viral reconsider how he was going to respond to a crisis of this nature. This was the point of germination for cFIRST Background Checks LLP, when Viral came back to India and established a tech unit in Bangalore in the year 2008. He soon moved to Ahmedabad and the headquarter of cFIRST was established with a very small team, which was soon joined by Ms. Lourdes Fernandes in 2012. Her vision to bring cFIRST on the global map aligned with the vision of Mr. Vora and together they took some major business decisions in the year 2013 that made cFIRST what it is today. cFIRST established their headquarter in the United States of America, in Cincinnati, Ohio, that is now one of the leading background check companies in the U.S.

cFIRST Background Checks takes pride in announcing that it has 2000+ clients from across the world now, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to cutting-edge start-ups, that continue to make difference in the world with their expertise including tech-giants such as IBM and Capgemini. Currently, cFIRST is the only Indian background screening company to have global footprint that can cater to clients in India, in the USA, and 175+ other countries.

cFIRST has also been awarded by one of the world’s largest companies as their ‘Trusted Verification Partner’ as the team continues to tread on the edge and make their mark every single day. They continue to dominate the global market with their precision of services, overcoming road-blocks and automating the process of hiring with integrity, competence and commitment.

Throughout this remarkable journey of delivering excellence, cFIRST has gained accolades which they are humbled by. With a clientele of more than 2000 organizations worldwide, it has successfully conducted more than 5 million background checks since its inception. It is an ISO 27001:2013 certified company and is also NABPS, NASSCOM NSR empaneled. Furthermore, cFIRST has also received accreditations from ACBCB, IAF, and QIC which have made this trek, nothing short of fascinating.

With an API-integrated clientele platform, cFIRST continues to march ahead, with the same amount of dedication, passion and integrity as it had on the first day of its journey and the team only hopes to keep up with the technology that is yet to unfold in future to continue solving issues related to the process of hiring and recruitment.

Top Employee Background Screening Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Imagine that you are the security officer of a Fortune 500 company and there is a hiring upsurge going on as your company is in growth mode. Your company requires hundreds of employees for jobs throughout the organization. Each month about 2,000 candidates are interviewed. In terms of security, it means there are 2,000 opportunities for a wrong person to a part of the company’s workforce.

Fortunately, your company routinely conducts background screening of candidates to ensure that those with criminal records or falsified resumes are discarded quickly. But, as the demand for the workers grows, your company needs to interview more candidates who are either educated or have worked abroad. This is yet another addition to the already big list of background screening challenges.

In this fast paced global business environment, several companies are facing multiple challenges in getting their candidates’ background screened and verified. But, if you have professionals who have knowledge of global customs and laws, precise verification of information provided by multinational candidates, vendors and job consultants can be carried out smoothly.

It is also important for the company to conduct background screening of all employees and job candidates on a consistent basis. This is done to ensure that there are no chances of prejudice, racial profiling, and other unfair and illegal hiring practices. It is a very important step from a security perspective.

Successfully managing employee background screening and verification, especially for organizations that hire hundreds and thousands of employees every month at a global level, comes with lot of challenges. In this ebook we have discussed at length, some of the biggest employee background screening challenges and ideas on overcoming them.

• Selecting the right background screening vendor
• Creating global screening policies to attract global workforce
• Non-compliance with global laws
• Reducing the turnaround time of the screening report
• Extracting quality information
• Using social media screening the right way
• Proper use of reference checks
• Ensuring Great Candidate Experience

Note:- This article was originally published on - https://www.cfirstcorp.com/background-screening-challenges/

How To Make a Career in Background Verification Industry?

It is great to learn that you have decided to make a career in background verification industry. The next logical step would be to find out the different positions that you can apply to become an integral part of this industry. But, before we look at the different positions and the different skill sets required to excel in the positions in order to ensure a long, fulfilling career, it is important to understand that unlike other industries, working in background verification industry is quite different. You need to be on your toes all the time. The reason being, you will be entrusted with certain critical tasks that will help in scrutinizing the background information of candidates in question. 

So, without any further delay, let us start off with the different profiles that you can opt to be an integral part of a background verification industry. If you think you have specific skill sets pertaining to any of the jobs enumerated below you can apply to any of the leading background verification companies in India.

1. Client Coordinator

As a client coordinator you will work as the face of the company wherein your major responsibility would be to speak with the client, i.e.; the accounts manager over the phone, in person or through email and understand their requirements. Your ultimate objective would be to provide excellence in customer service and maximize the client experience. Some of the major skill sets required for this position include: excellent communication skills, pleasant personality, knack of dealing with people and great analytical skills.  Some of your job responsibilities will include:

• Document and secure records from the existing customers
• Maintain confidentiality of both candidates and the clients
• Maintaining and developing existing and new customers through proper account support and liaison with internal processing staff
• Handling the client queries and escalation calls and coordinating with HRs, directors and other officials for the verification. 

2. Report Writer

Report writers are a crucial part of the background verification process. To become a report writer, you need to have a knack of understanding report structure as per the requirement of the client along with the proficiency in working with databases, spreadsheets and reporting software. Some other duties of a report writer include: 

• Documenting and maintaining daily reports by closely working with the end-users 
• Gathering report requirements and ensuring proper validation
• Modify existing reports as per the client requirements

3. Quality Reviewer

As a quality reviewer, your job would be to evaluate the quality of data entry work done by data entry operators and case researchers thereby ensuring that the right source of information has been used by cross validating the verification obtained by the operation team. You should also have the knack of finding errors in verification reports and train the operations team to minimize these errors. This makes it significant for you to have strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to maintain tracker of your own performance. To grow as a quality reviewer is important to have good knowledge of MS Excel & MS Office. 

4. Client Servicing - Team Leader

As a client servicing team leader it would be your duty to manage the client service team of 8-10 client servicing executives and ensuring that delivery standards are met as per the client requirement. Some of your duties will include:

• Ensuring steady progress on client requirements and share monthly reporting deliverables with superiors
• If there are any high priority cases, then you need to work with the operations team for effective results
• Create and execute client service strategies for your organization
• Ensure steady functioning of customer service operations to track and identify high value clients
• Build strong client relationships.

Some of the skill sets that you need to possess in order to excel in the position of a client servicing team leader include: excellent communication skills, go getter attitude, knowledge of MS Office and good man management skills. 

Vivek Asrani is a content specialist at cFIRST Background Checks, one of leading employee background verification companies in india. Vivek writes about the various aspects of recruitment technology.

How Does Employee Background Verification Work in India?

The process of employee background verification in India is still at an infancy stage. Although, background verification has always been on the radar of HR professionals, its role has been limited to verification of educational documents and past experience letters. But, with the recent rise in incidents of falsified profiles, Indian organizations have started to include employee background verification as a key component of their recruitment and screening process. 

The process of background verification in India varies across organizations and industries. But the standard process includes a comprehensive check of the candidate’s educational degrees, employment details, residential address, credit scores and criminal background. The time taken to complete the background verification depends on the extent of probing required. If you have never conducted background verification of your employees before and thinking of trying it, you would do well to hire one of the trustworthy background verification companies in India.  

Typically, background verification process in India includes the following:

1. Employment verification

The background verification partner commences the process by calling the past employers to scrutinize the details provided by the candidate in their resume. It will include: conduct and behavior, employment duration, verification of pay slips and performance history. By doing adequate research you can get a fair idea about whether the candidate is the right fit for the vacancy and will be able to adjust to your organizational culture or not. 

2. Education verification

In the next step, the candidate’s educational credentials are verified. It has been observed that certain candidates due to extreme pressure tend to falsify their educational credentials to secure a good job. It can harm the reputation of your organization if the candidate is not able to perform well in the vacant position. This makes screening partners to approach universities to confirm the educational qualification of the candidate. Most of the screening firms have access to the National Academics Repository which makes their task a little bit easier.

3. Residential verification

After successful verification of the educational credentials of the candidate, the next step is to verify their residential address. Now, you might wonder why would someone lie about their residence address? The sad part is some people do who are involved in some sort of crimes and frauds to prevent themselves from getting caught. This makes it extremely critical to carry out residential verification as a part of background verification in India. The process is completed by calling or visiting the candidate’s home and getting it verified by their family member or neighbor.

4. Criminal verification

Earlier, criminal verification was never carried out by Indian organizations. But, recently there has been a rise in cases of harassment, frauds and other crimes at a workplace that has awakened organizations to stay alert by conducting criminal verification on candidates. Screening partners have contacts in courts, which gives them easy access to court records and criminal databases that assist in screening the past of the candidate. 

Once these four steps have been completed, the employee background verification gets over in India. Based on the results obtained, the organization can make the hiring decision. Although, there is always an opportunity to screen the candidates yourself, it is advisable to take assistance from a professional background screening vendor. Their expertise, knowledge and access to information repository can fasten the background verification process and also make it reliable.

5 Reasons Why Employee Background Verification is Necessary

As a recruiter, you always try to find the best talent for the organization. But, the question is: are the candidates showing their true nature when they give their resumes during the interview? In such a short span of time, it is impossible to know the true nature of the candidate. Most of the times it has been observed that candidates lie in at least some form in their resumes. With high stakes riding on you to recruit the best talent it becomes essential to scrutinize the information pertaining to the candidate so that the right individual gets selected for the vacant position. This endeavor can be achieved with the help of employee background verification.

There are times when the candidate may try to hide certain facets of their personality that can harm their chances of getting recruited. With the help of an employee background verification, you can unearth past wrongs of the candidate, including terrorism activities, criminal records, drug and substance abuse, sex offense, etc. Partner with any of the leading background verification companies in India and let them help you filter out candidates with questionable traits that can harm your workplace environment.

Here are some other reasons that make employee background verification very necessary while hiring a candidate:

1. Scares candidates having questionable records from applying

With the help of an effective employee background verification process, it is possible to find out those candidates who have questionable records. This makes such candidates highly susceptible thereby ensuring that such individuals do not apply for the vacant position in your organization. It also assists in weeding out undeserving candidates and you are left with quality talent pool to select the best talent.

2. Highlights past criminal records

While recruiting members into your workforce, organizations want to avoid hiring candidates with a criminal past. This is especially important to keep your workplace safe for your workers and clients. Although, there are chances that the candidate might have reformed their way to become law abiding citizens, you still have the right to know about their criminal past to make an informed hiring decision. This is only possible with the help of a comprehensive employee background verification. If you fail to conduct the background verification process and the candidate is a convicted sex offender, your employees can get sexually harassed that can lead to unnecessary harassment of your current employees. This makes it mandatory to conduct employee background verification.

3. Verifies the academic credentials of the candidate

Due to the competitive nature of the job market, there are times when certain candidates resort to lying about their academic credentials. According to Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) almost half of the resumes consist of false information. The only way to scrutinize the academic qualification is by conducting employee background verification. It will help you to avoid hiring under-qualified candidates for crucial positions in the organization. There are times when a candidate requires a certain professional certification to be able to perform the job and the only way to ascertain that is with the help of a background check.

4. Keeps your workplace drug free

It has generally been observed that drug abuse in the workplace can result in reduced productivity. This makes it important for you as an employer to keep your workplace to be drug free. One way to ascertain that the new hires are not drug addicts or drug dealers is by conducting employee background verification. With the help of a comprehensive background check, you can find out such information which can be highly essential to make the best hiring decision. Background verification can also ascertain that past drug charges and current drug users without any past drug charges do not make it to your workplace.

5. Provides peace of mind

By conducting a comprehensive employee background verification, you can rest assured that the candidate can be trusted. It helps you to dodge common worries like: Is my new employee a vicious lawbreaker? Is my new employee a cheat? Is my new employee a mugger? Etc. By having a peace of mind you can concentrate on effectively running your business.

Conclusion

Conducting employee background verification is no longer an option for an organization. It has become a crucial element during the hiring process that helps recruiters to select the best candidates for their organization every time.