New research reveals 42% of applicants deliberately lie to prospective employers – embellishing a CV is not a little white lie.
Xref is a cloud-based reference checking service. iTWire interviewed Tim Griffiths CTO and co-founder earlier this year and has seen this company and its service go from strength to strength.
Xref commissioned Quantum Market Research for its inaugural Recruitment Risk Index that has proven what we all know - the extent to which candidates will deceive potential employers to improve their chances of getting a job.
The findings, based on a survey of 1,000 Australians aged between 18 and 39 who had applied for a new job in the last two years, revealed 42% had used a variety of deliberately deceptive methods. These included exaggerating their work experience and qualifications, misrepresenting employment dates and job titles and, in 23% of cases, asking a referee to lie for them or pretend to be someone they’re not.
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Xref co-founder and CEO, Lee-Martin Seymour, said the research would shine a much-needed light on the issues caused by a reliance on old, tired and inefficient HR business processes. “These findings should come as a major wake-up call for Australian businesses. Advancements in technology and data collection in recent years mean that good-quality data has become the minimum requirement for business processes. We must improve the efficiency of recruitment or face continued candidate fraud, hiring based on inaccurate data and ultimately, money wasted on critical stages of the hiring period.”
The research also found
- 84% of candidates are applying to more than one employer at a time
- 71% are willing to “exploit flaws” in the reference checking system
- 42% have actually lied
- 42% have abandoned applications due to delays in reference checking
- 30% were asked for inappropriate details including the candidate’s age (15%), marital status (10%) and sexual orientation (7%)
Xref floated on the Australian Stock Exchange in February 2016. Since then it has built a unique, cloud-based, reference checking facility (HR technology) that can replace the traditional manual reference check.
Xref Candidate Referencing for Oracle Talent Management Cloud is now available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. It enables prospective employers to automate their pre-employment reference checks on suitable candidates, reducing valuable time spent chasing reference feedback while adding additional compliance to the recruitment process.