do credit card companies check your wagers

westernpromise

The credit reference agencies are working on a service to validate CVs wich will give details of lengths of employements and time at addresses to validate a Job candidates CV. How long do you think it will be before it has salaries, tax returns, pay rises, disciplinary records etc on it?

Do you know how this is intended to work? I ask because a few years ago I was involved with a company which was trying to develop something similar. We were thinking we could use it to predict success in particular jobs based on who else does them successfully, but the CV checking angle was also useful.

We figured it would work by comparing your current CV with previous versions of it. There appeared to be non-trivial issues with the Data Protection Act, though.

Most interested if someone else has found a way to make it work.

InsuranceLiability

Last I heard, Experian do something already (and have done for a while) which checks address, employers address and time with employer. The information about your start and end dates is obviously voluntary from your employer and I imagine it was sketchy to start off but this is how HPI autocheck got started.
Remember as well the employer has to send the candidates CV to be 'processed' which will involve it having to 'stored' and it may take up to 6 months before any housekeeping routines can 'archive' this information away.

The data protection act has many loopholes in this area.

westernpromise

Interesting.

We figured that headhunters all have piles of candidates' CVs. At any given time, they are marketing maybe 5% of those. The other 95% are useless - obsolete CVs.

What we planned to do was build an engine which would read that other 95%. Every time an employer needs to hire somebody, he'd do a search of that 95% among every recruitment agency signed up. If a match for his needs was found, the contact would be made through the agency with the most up-to-date CV on its books.

The agency gets a new client, the client gets a new hire, and everybody's happy. The agency is incentivised to keep its CVs up to date and the search is being made among people they aren't marketing anyway.

So Widgets Ltd might do a search and get connected to John Smith Executive Search. JSES has Fred Brown's 18-month-old CV and it looks like a fit for the new opening at Widgets Ltd. Widgets Ltd are already a client of JSES but the latter would never have suggested Fred Brown because they don't market 18 month old CVs. So everybody's happy. Widgets get their man, JSES get a fee, and Fred gets a job.

It wasn't long before it occurred to us that you could use such an engine for CV checking. Instead of doing an expensive background check, you just use the search engine to compare all known versions of the same candidate's CV. Any gaps, omissions, exaggerations or other lies would instantly leap out.

You'd need the candidate to agree to it though, and that's what we couldn't find a way through. How is a headhunter you spoke to 10 years ago going to persuade you to let them release your 10-year-old CV?

InsuranceLiability

Bit off topic but ...
As the recruitment agencies merge and get bigger I can see them starting to do this themselves and selling the data on.


To get round the obvious issues set up as a none EU company and store all data offshore. The US data protection act has very little in it.

My favourite is that people who lied (or even exagerated) on an application many years ago can be prosecuted many years in the future. Great for employers who dont like the employment law or financial services company who want to get rid of difficult customers.

westernpromise

As long as you can prove it was the applicant who lied. If a CV is retyped by the recruiter in its house style, it is conceivable that the recruiter screwed up. Eg they may have edited a previous document and left anotehr candidate's info in there by mistake.

I can't see any reason for a company to check its ex-employees in this way, but there could be a nice little ambulance-chasing business for someone. You could sue a company's ex-employees for damages if they lied on a job application, then collect a percentage.

TREVORCOLMAN

Giving your lover free travel when she is not entitled (David Blunket) is "NOT WISE" either! I was going to say fraud but I thought I better not!

;D

InsuranceLiability

I can't see any reason for a company to check its ex-employees in this way, but there could be a nice little ambulance-chasing business for someone. You could sue a company's ex-employees for damages if they lied on a job application, then collect a percentage.

They would do this to give just cause for dismissal as a defence in a constructive/unfair dismissal case - or to sack somebody in the first place