Vector Reduce Risk of CV Dishonesty

Posted by Vector Resourcing on Friday 5 June 2009

SkillsActive, the government backed agency, have just published the findings of their research into dishonesty in CVs.

http://www.skillsactive.com/resources/news/lies-on-cvs-increase-as-the-job-market-worsens

This is said to be an increasing trend with the current market and high competition for jobs. However it is nothing new, has always required recruiters to be diligent, and can affect everyone (even Sir Alan Sugar on ‘The Apprentice’ has seen a dodgy CV or two).

This is a problem which can affect the contract recruitment market just as much as the permanent recruitment market, perhaps even more so, as there can often be a greater number of end clients, roles and responsibilities on a contractor CV allowing increased opportunity for misrepresentation.

Inevitably an element of trust must come into every recruitment process. The agency, the contractor and the client must all be honest with each other, but there are ways of reducing the risk of contractor dishonesty.

At Vector we verbally reference check all contractors we present to clients as standard. However we also go much further than this:

• We have a much lower reliance on CVs than other agencies. We ask people to describe their experience in their own words and to verbalise their projects and experience. We can relay this information to our clients on the telephone and avoid the pitfalls of CVs. It is much harder to be dishonest verbally than on paper.

• We advertise far less than other recruitment agencies. We use our extensive, market-leading database to find suitable contractor matches. This means that contractors do not get the chance to ‘fix’ their CV to match an advert, rather we examine the one we have on record and ask people to discuss their abilities and we assess them from there.

• Our individual market knowledge experience is crucial in assessing contractors' abilities and experience. For example, my specialist area is ERP. We know who the best ERP contractors are for each role and we go to those we know first. If we have a new CV in we can spot any anomalies because we know which companies run which ERP systems, which release they are on working on and which modules within that they use. We can double check authenticity through references, but also by contractors we know who have worked on the same sites. Contractors who are established in the ERP market but are tempted to ‘tweak’ their CVs a little too far will not risk upsetting leading specialist teams such as ours for danger of us not using them again.

All this means that when a contractor works via Vector you can trust our vetting process.

For advice on how to make sure your CV is the best and most honestly represents you, see our guide;

Getting-the-best-from-your-it-contractor-cv

 

Wayne Starritt
ERP Recruitment Consultant