As part of pre-employment background screening, many employers investigate criminal history and verify employment history, but education verification is another integral step towards vetting and hiring top talent. Whether it’s for an executive position or an entry-level position requiring specific licenses or credentials, sometimes applicants embellish their qualifications or make dishonest claims about their educational histories and degrees. Education verification protects your organization from negligent hiring liability, ensures the competency of your workforce, and minimizes the risk of hiring fraudulent candidates.
In this article, we’ll explore how education verification can help your organization improve its hiring process, ensure the productivity of new hires, quickly identify resume fraud, and sustain a positive company reputation by making informed choices about applicants.
What Does Education Verification Confirm?
Once an applicant has submitted their resume and other required application documents, education verification can quickly return and confirm the accuracy of key information, including the following:
- Any degree(s) earned
- Any educational institution(s) they’ve attended
- Dates of attendance at each institution
- Date that each degree was conferred to applicant
- GPA or Honors Received. GPA information may require an official transcripts request.
Education verification can also quickly identify any fabricated degree or institutions an applicant has listed; inaccurate dates or degree types; and any other misrepresentations regarding educational information. Since the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) does not place limitations on the timeline of education verification, it’s possible to verify an applicant’s educational qualifications over their entire lifetime.
In addition to comprehensive education verification, the Orsus Group also offers professional license verification to confirm an applicant’s licensure status, licenses held, expiration date, and other key information that can support the hiring process.
Ensure Workforce Competency & Job Preparedness
Across a number of industries, many key positions require specific degrees, licenses, or certifications to qualify for employment consideration. The skills an applicant has acquired through their education ensure that they will perform well and responsibly in the real-world context of your company or organization. If a candidate fabricates aspects of their educational background or misrepresents their qualifications in other ways, you risk exposure to major liability if these acts of fraud go undetected by your organization.
On an immediate and practical level, hiring an unqualified candidate also means expending money, time, and resources training and preparing a person who is ill-suited to the role. Company productivity, the cohesion of your team/department, and the quality of service to clients is also negatively affected. If resume fraud or lack of competency is discovered weeks or even months after hiring an employee, it may already be too late to minimize the damage to company reputation, productivity, or the morale of your existing workforce. As we’ll explore in a later section, the turnover costs and/or costs of a negligent hiring lawsuit can also cause major financial or reputation issues if an unqualified candidate is hired due to inaccurate educational information.
Minimize Risk of Hiring Fraudulent Candidates
Unfortunately, misrepresentation of educational credentials and other educational information is fairly common. Whether it’s an applicant purchasing a fake degree from a diploma mill, listing a prestigious institution they never attended, or claiming conferral of a degree that still requires additional coursework, all of these issues could lead to hiring an unqualified candidate who diminishes workplace health and safety, client satisfaction, workplace productivity, and the reputation of your organization.
With education verification, it’s much easier to quickly identify truthful and qualified applicants who can immediately contribute to your organization. This is especially important if you are weighing the pros and cons of multiple candidates and a promising candidate later turns out to have lied about their qualifications. Instead, with education verification, you can readily confirm a host of educational information to ensure each candidate you are seriously considering is well-suited to the position and prepared to contribute.
Reduce Hiring Costs
Education verification can significantly reduce hiring costs by providing confirmation of a candidate’s educational credentials quickly – transforming a process that often takes weeks into a matter of hours. This spares your organization the time-consuming process of separately contacting each educational institution or licensing organization to provide transcripts or degree information. It also safeguards against onboarding hours, early job training or resources expended on a candidate whose educational background does not qualify or prepare them for the position.
Educational credentials can also have a major bearing on what a candidate is offered in compensation for an open position. If a candidate possesses an advanced degree from a prestigious institution and leverages those credentials to secure a better offer from a hiring manager, this can have negative consequences if it is later determined that the candidate was lying. In addition to the financial impact, hiring based on false credentials can also have a detrimental effect on workforce morale if colleagues realize the employee was being highly compensated despite consistent poor performance or lack of productivity stemming from a poor hiring decision.
Finally, education verification dramatically reduces turnover costs resulting from an uninformed hiring decision. Keeping in mind the scenario we just discussed, education verification eliminates the onboarding and training costs that might result from a manual/in-house education verification that takes weeks to complete. Education verification also eliminates the extended costs of terminating the new hire’s employment, reposting the position, choosing a new hire and onboarding for a second time.
Successfully Manage Compliance, Liability, and Company Reputation
Without education verification, employers are exposed to the possibility of a workplace incident resulting from an unqualified employee’s actions. Although this is a serious concern in all industries, it’s especially problematic in fields like healthcare and other fields where workplace health and safety is an amplified and daily concern. In the end, a candidate who lies about educational credentials is likely untrustworthy in a general sense and could create a number of issues in the workplace that culminate in a negligent hiring lawsuit from an employee, client, or customer.
Using education verification ensures that your existing employees and clients are protected from the potential risks of an unqualified employee working for your organization. In addition to providing this practical protection, education verification also ensures that you sustain the reputational standing and integrity of your organization by making informed and expedient hiring decisions with the most accurate and complete information available.
Screen & Hire Qualified Candidates with The Orsus Group
A manual, in-house, or incomplete education verification process can lead to inaccuracies and delays that cost your organization financially, reputationally, and negatively impact productivity and workforce morale. Ensure the credibility of your hiring process by using The Orsus Group’s comprehensive background check services. Ready to get started? Take the first step towards safeguarding your company’s reputation and hiring top talent from the start.