EmployeeScreenIQ Blog

We’ve just posted a guest article on EmployeeScreen University about the efficacy of resumes in today’s marketplace authored by Kevin W. Grossman, Chief Marketplace Evangelist at Fisher Vista, LLC and HRmarketer.com Check it out.

Okay, it’s not dead yet, but I want it to die.

I understand that there’s still a huge part of the career management industry keeping it alive, making it better and making it work for you, the job seeker. To all my friends in this industry, please forgive me, as I also understand it’s probably not going anywhere for years to come.

But I still want the painfully ubiquitous resume to die a horrible death.

Why? Because it’s a self-serving piece of inconsistently formatted and fudged professional drivel that really doesn’t help me hire true quality of fit. Just ask any background screening firm that does employment and education verifications. For example, EmployeeScreenIQ’s research yields a 52% discrepancy rate between what an applicant claims about their education and work experience and what they find when they verify such information.

Fifty-two percent. Sure, the resume helps me sift and sort to the short list, but a short list that’s almost half fabrication on the average. And if you as the job seeker take that risk and blatantly lie or embellish on your resume, and my background screening firm uncovers it, you are out of luck at a time of high unemployment where you really need a little luck.

Yes, embellishing the truth is fabrication. It doesn’t make it any better than an outright lie, especially if you’re telling me you’ve been programming native iPhone apps for the past six months and you really only took an online course six months ago and made one farting app, one that isn’t very good anyway because it sounds like a Yorkshire Terrier barking.

So what then do we put instead of this black magic resume full of lies and deceit?

Your professional online profile, of course. Like the one you better have completely up to date on LinkedIn, where thousands of recruiting professionals are scouring and sourcing every day. (And I’m not even talking about the majority of recruiting pros who search for online information about you across the internet and other social networks.) And by the way, much of the same advice you may get about building your resume applies to the online profile as well.

However, I get the fact that anybody can fudge an online profile just as well as they can a resume. But, there’s a peer pressure element of keeping one another honest in an online community where your professional history is available to everyone you’re connected with, many of whom you‘ve worked with or for at one time, if not currently, as well as the portion that’s available for public consumption if you so choose.

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Question: What do United Airlines Pilot, Dr. William Hamman and I have in common?

Answer: We are both not cardiologists or any other type of doctor for that matter.  However, one of us pretended to be. And that person is not your favorite background screening blogger.  Stop me if you’ve seen this movie.

A.P.: Pilot Duped AMA with Fake M.D. Claim

He seemed like Superman, able to guide jumbo jets through perilous skies and tiny tubes through blocked arteries. As a cardiologist and United Airlines captain, William Hamman taught doctors and pilots ways to keep hearts and planes from crashing.

He shared millions in grants, had university and hospital posts, and bragged of work for prestigious medical groups. An Associated Press story featured him leading a teamwork training session at an American College of Cardiology convention last spring.

But it turns out Hamman isn’t a cardiologist or even a doctor. The AP found he had no medical residency, fellowship, doctoral degree or the 15 years of clinical experience he claimed. He attended medical school for a few years but withdrew and didn’t graduate.

His pilot qualifications do not appear to be in question — he holds the highest type of license a pilot can have, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman said. However, United grounded him in August after his medical and doctoral degrees evaporated like contrails of the jets he flew. He resigned in June as an educator and researcher at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., after a credentials check revealed discrepancies, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Doctors who worked with the 58-year-old pilot are stunned, not just at the ruse and how long it lasted, but also because many of them valued his work and were sad to see it end.

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Just asking, but wouldn’t a thorough employment background check have uncovered this charade?  I imagine that performing an Education Verification with the medical school or performing a Professional License Check might have done the trick.

Note to United.  I hope that this post in no way, shape or form compromises my frequent flier status or upgrade request I recently made with your airline.  I love to fly the friendly skies!

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A Jet Blue flight attendant quit his job in a very interesting way on Monday.  I’ll refrain from paraphrasing because I believe this article does it enough justice.  Should any future employer  conduct an employment verification with Jet Blue, he can pretty much bank on not receiving a good reference.  Not to mention he may also have to explain a stint in prison.  Best of luck buddy!

Cursing, beer and a popped chute as flight attendant quits

New York (CNN) — Call them the not-so-friendly skies.

A flight attendant cursed out passengers, grabbed a beer then triggered an emergency chute Monday at a JFK Airport terminal, authorities say.

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said it “appears” Steven Slater was quitting.

“It’s a strange way to quit, let’s put it that way,” he said. “I don’t think he’ll be able to come back.”

Police arrested Slater for allegedly triggering the emergency escape chute, a spokeswoman for the district attorney said.

Slater was arrested at his home and charged with criminal mischief, reckless endangerment and criminal trespass, said Helen Peterson at the Queens District Attorney’s Office.

The incident took place just after the Jet Blue flight landed when a passenger stood to remove a bag from the overhead bin while the plane was still taxiing, a law enforcement source with direct knowledge said. A flight attendant exchanged words with the passenger, and the conversation escalated.

Slater picked up the intercom and used expletives directed at the passengers, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation. It is not clear exactly what was said on the intercom. The source said that when the plane at stopped at the gate, Slater then grabbed some beer from the beverage cart before deploying the emergency slide and using it to leave the plane.

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Greenberg Traurig labor and employment attorney, Dan Pasterternak just posted a story about an employer who lost a multimillion dollar judgement over a negative job reference/employment verification which deviated from company policy.  See Dan’s post below which includes his advice for providing employment verifications.

Like most employers, Credit Agricole’s policy is only to confirm dates of employment in response to a request for employment verification, without providing any information about a former employee’s job performance. But that didn’t happen to William Raedle.

Instead, according to court testimony reported in the press,his former supervisor told a prospective boss at Dreyfus Corp. that William had difficulty working with others and had mental issues. Raedle didn’t get the job at Dreyfus. What he did get, however, was a big verdict in his favor against Credit Agricole. After a weeklong trial, a jury in a New York federal court deliberated only five hours to award Raedle $2.4 million in lost earnings, damage to his reputation, and punitive damages, including $200,000 in punitive damages against his former supervisor for interfering with his efforts to get a job at Dreyfus.  (The trial judge vacated the punitive damage awards on the defendants’ post-trial motions, reducing the judgment amount to just over $1.6 million.)

What does this case tell us?

It’s not just what your policy says on paper, but what actually happens that really matters. No policy – whether it’s an employment reference policy, an anti-discrimination or anti-harassment policy, a leave policy, etc. – will amount to a hill of beans if you aren’t following it. The key is making sure that all employees are trained, and, if appropriate, periodically retrained, to comply with company policy. As the case shows, the consequences of failing to actually do what your policy says can be enormous.

The moral of the story is not to stop performing employment verifications.  In fact, we seen and written about instances where an employer failed to provide adverse information and was later successfully sued for not warning the prospective employer, Employment Verifications: Less May No Longer Be More.  Employers must be consistent and must reinforce company policies again and again.

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I just read a scary workplace violence story out of Knoxville, TN where a school teacher shot both his principal and assistant principal after his contract was not renewed.  In the aftermath, authorities wondered what the school could have done to prevent this unfortunate incident.  They conducted on a background check and it didn’t raise any red flags.  Well, unfortunately that background check did not include past employment verifications or references.  If they would have contacted the teacher’s most recent prior employer they would have found his former supervisor said that he threatened him with physical harm while in his employ.

We’ve recently spent a lot of time discussing how employers can avoid violence in the workplace (check out our white paper: Protecting Your Employees from Workplace Violence).  One of the key areas for prevention is to conduct a thorough background check.

See this excerpt from a letter written by a Knoxville area human resources professional published on KnoxvilleNews.com:

As a human resources professional, I can’t imagine why his former employers weren’t called as part of his background check. References (which should include past employers) are a basic part of any pre-employment screening process.

When one of his former supervisors was interviewed on a local television station, he said Foster threatened him with physical harm. Why didn’t the person responsible for doing the background check on Foster know that?

On the day the tragedy occurred, Superintendent Jim McIntyre stated that, during Foster’s hiring process, nothing was discovered that caused alarm. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything in his past that would cause alarm. It just means that someone in the Knox County school system’s human resources department obviously didn’t do a thorough job, and they should be held accountable.

Parents have a right to expect that the individuals who are with their children for most of the day are stable and able to nurture them. Foster was teaching fourth-graders and yelling at them.

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Law.com just posted a nice article about the importance of doing thorough background checks on Lawyers.  It appears taht Mark Villeneuve, a CT Licensed lawyer lied on his resume.  We have heard this story a million times before but if you read on you will see how a few lies can create a snowball effect!

Bending the Truth Can Break a Legal Career

It’s a difficult economy and you’re a job applicant looking for any edge. Better give a long second thought to padding that resume or fudging the truth on an application, especially if you’re a lawyer.

Consider the case of Mark Villeneuve, a Connecticut-licensed lawyer who lives in Augusta, Maine. His professional standing is under attack because Connecticut grievance officials believe he lied multiple times when he e-mailed his resume and application for a staff attorney position to the state Workers’ Compensation Commission.

Villeneuve did far more than embellish a job title or try to cover up a period of unemployment. He claimed to have graduated cum laude from Western New England College School of Law in 2004 and to have served as the law review’s assistant note editor. Yes, he was a WNEC grad. But he was neither cum laude nor a law review editor.

Villeneuve also stated that he was employed at the Law Offices of Jean Smith in Meriden, Conn., a firm that Villeneuve said handled all types of workers’ comp matters. Turns out that no such firm exists.

State officials say the inconsistencies on the job application were revealed after Villeneuve had interviewed in person for the Workers’ Compensation Commission position. But Villeneuve is claiming that he never applied for the job and never appeared for that interview in February 2008; he says someone must have stolen his identity and pretended to be him.

The Statewide Grievance Committee isn’t buying it. They want the Superior Court to dole out the appropriate punishment. Villeneuve, who has responded to the grievance complaint in writing only, has moved to dismiss the case.

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Found this on CNN.com and figured I would post it before the holiday weekend.  This is a good article about reference checks, a sometimes critical part of the background screening process.  Enjoy!

Do references really matter?
By Rachel Zupek, CareerBuilder.com
November 25, 2009 12:05 p.m. EST

(CareerBuilder.com) — The importance of references seems to be a hot topic these days. Employers want to make sure they are hiring the right person for the job; but some thwart the process because checking references can be labor-intensive. On the other hand, job seekers provide references they know will give a glowing report, but employers are getting smarter and finding references you didn’t provide.

So, what’s the deal? Do references matter? Do employers even check them anymore? What’s the protocol for providing them to a potential employer? Who are the best people to include as references? And, if an employer doesn’t call any of your references, is it a bad sign?

While the definitive answer to any of these questions depends on the employer, overall, yes, references do still matter. The process has just changed.

“References play a huge role in the hiring process, perhaps now more than ever,” said Heather R. Huhman, founder and president of Come Recommended, an online community that connects internship and entry-level job candidates with employers.” Oftentimes, hiring managers fall in love with a candidate on paper and then again in an interview, only to find out through a reference check that none of their previous employers would ever hire them again. By checking a candidate’s references, hiring managers save themselves the frustration of hiring a person who is not a good fit for a company. In this economy, where hiring budgets are slim, every hire must be a great fit.”

Provided references are no guarantee

Though the majority of employers do check references, others skip this step. Not only is it labor-intensive to check references for people who might not be poised for a job offer, but Jack Harsh, adjunct professor at the University of Richmond Robins School of Business, said that many employers worry about the risk of liability in rejecting a candidate based on poor references.

“[Hiring] decisions cannot be based on information that is discriminatory in nature, so to avoid any liability, the checks are forgone,” Harsh said. “Sadly, the first reference the employer gets in such cases is from colleagues after employment has begun.”

Steve Langerud, director of career development at Depauw University, adds that sometimes, the quality of references is benign.

“Everyone wants to be helpful and supportive to former employees, but in the end, they offer little substance to a new employer,” he says. “Legally, they are limited by what they can or want to say about former employees. I think the old formal system of references is dead in most professional fields.”

Langerud warns that just because an employer isn’t checking personal references the traditional way doesn’t mean he isn’t checking references at all.

“Employers are more likely to check the informal, but tangible, behavioral reference sources like LinkedIn, Facebook, credit history [or] criminal history than the more subjective references provided by candidates,” he said. “Candidates should be much more intentional about crafting a professional identity that serves the role of a ‘reference’ but within the context of the work, profession and colleagues you seek to engage. It eliminates the weaknesses inherent in the old style of references that become so watered down they are useless.”

The last thing you want to do is give an employer useless references, but many job seekers make the mistake of not taking the time to thoughtfully choose the right people to speak on their behalf, said Elaine Varelas, managing partner for Keystone Partners, an outplacement and talent management consulting firm.

“You want people who can speak to your role as a professional, not as a nice neighbor,” Varelas said. “Candidates can make their references count by prepping them to discuss their specific skills as they relate to the job and the impact they brought to the job, which can be just the differentiation needed in this highly competitive market.”

Harsh agrees that when he receives a résumé with references attached, he gives them virtually no weight.

“They seldom are specific to the role my company seeks and are not meaningful in considering qualifications or traits of successful candidate,” he said.

Finally, when it comes to protocol for submitting references, the process has changed as well. It used to be that applicants sent them in with their other application materials, but now, Varelas says, you should wait to provide references until you are asked.

“Most companies do not want your references until the end of the process and they will let you know when to provide a list of names and contact information. Do not send written references,” she said. “These do not offer the highest impact as they are not specific on how you will fit into the job you are pursuing. It is better to spend your time preparing your references for the kinds of questions they will be asked, and what they can do to help you close an offer.”

Helpful hints

Harsh, Varelas and Langerud offer these 10 tips to ensure you do everything right when it comes to providing references:

1. Include references only when requested by an employer.

2. Carefully consider whom to provide after discussion with the prospective employer. The time to check references is before an offer is made, but after the candidate is either the final candidate or among the final few for the job.

3. Seek references from people who actually know you and your work. Ask for permission to list them as a reference.

4. Ask directly if they can provide you with a positive reference for the position(s) you are seeking. If they hesitate, move on!

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