What is Employment Verification?

The process of validating a job candidate’s past work history is called Employment Verification. It ensures that the candidate has the appropriate experience to perform well in your company and helps you hire the best additions to your team. Employment verification also helps to reveal gaps in their history or false claims that candidates might have made.

We can look at it as a tool for the pre-employment screening procedure for you to understand which candidates are trustworthy and a good fit for your team. It can have many positive effects in the long run to maintain the growth of your company. 

Employment verification can be an essential step in your hiring procedure. Many applicants try to put false information in their resumes to represent their skills and experience better. This can happen more often than you think - according to surveys, more than half of employers have caught lies on resumes, which means that candidates might not be qualified enough for the job they are applying for. 

There is one clear solution for that - verifying the previous employment of a candidate and making sure that a person is trustworthy from the beginning of the relationship. In this article, we’ll dive deep into this topic and tell you more about Employment Verification. We will discuss the main purpose of this procedure, background checks, and how to get started. 

What is the purpose of employment verification?

Employers can have doubts and concerns about candidates for a particular job, and specifically about the validity of the information on their resume. That’s why they verify employment history to confirm whether the data provided is accurate or not. The work experience needs to meet the position’s requirements. This procedure is considered part of a comprehensive pre-employment screening process that can help you be confident in your decisions when expanding your team with the people you need.

There are several things that employment verification can help you with when it comes to hiring and choosing the right people for your company to accelerate growth. Firstly, it helps you hire qualified candidates more quickly - it speeds up the overall procedure to get appropriate people on board. It also helps to make sure that your candidate’s employment history is accurate, which can build more trust between two parties. Employment verification assists you to confirm that the candidate has the skills and experience required for the role, and mitigates the risk of hiring someone with false credentials. 

So the primary purpose of employment verification is to make sure that you avoid inconsistencies between the information a job applicant gives you and their actual employment history. It is a type of background check that helps you be more confident with hiring and build trust with a potential team member of your company.

How does a background check verify employment?

Usually, employment verification is one of the components of a complete background check. It can also include identity verification, a criminal record check, education history, professional license verification, education history, and more. The goal is to understand and analyze the whole background of a potential employee, which can reveal some valuable insights about the person. 

This can play an integral role in the background check process. Most of the time, employers make their decisions based on the candidate's work experience. They want to know that their potential teammates have held similar jobs in the past, which is the reason why they might want to double-check with previous employers of this candidate. However, employer verification laws state that employers don't have an obligation to respond to calls to verify an individual's employment.  

Agencies providing professional background checks are consumer reporting agencies (CRA) operating under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). When an employer contacts this institution to do the background check, including employment verification, the employer must notify the candidate beforehand and get approval from them formally. When making a final decision, this information is taken into account. That's why the potential candidate should be aware of it.

How to get employment verification?

Employment verification involves contacting the list of workplaces that candidates have provided to confirm this information's validity. It is important to compare the data written in the resume with reality.

The procedure itself consists of a couple of mandatory steps. Firstly, the service provider takes the information about the candidate provided in the resume and contacts past employers individually. Usually, HR representatives are the ones who verify all the necessary details about your candidate, including responsibilities, job title, and dates of employment. 

Usually, past employers are not limited in revealing information about their past employees, but the government might be strict about it in some places. Also, it might be prohibited to ask about a prospective employee's salary history. On the other hand, there are some cases where companies themselves create policies to restrict the type of information they can disclose. It might be past employees' start and end dates, their salaries, or job titles.

After the service provider is done with the employment verification procedure, you get a report based on the verification background check, and you can carry on with the hiring procedure. This element of hiring has many great outcomes, and it is beneficial when hiring for senior roles because it helps to choose the best candidates for the position. 

Getting help with employment verification

There are several service providers that can help with employment verification. These companies can take over this stage of hiring and go through a couple of steps to ensure that the information is valid. Steps can include checking the data with every workplace on an applicant's resume, using independently obtained phone numbers, confirming the exact dates, and complying with relevant government institutions (if needed). 

Here at Veriff, we work hard daily to build trust in the digital world and create products that can assist you to connect with more honest people. Take a look at our products, and let us help you make your employment verification procedure smoother.