It’s difficult enough sometimes to find qualified and motivated candidates for clinical research job openings who are following all the rules. So, when competition gets so cutthroat that an entire shadow network of fake references springs up to help foist illegitimate new hires on short-staffed or over-eager employers via skullduggery, caution should be the hiring manager’s byword.
“When the topic of how to identify fake job applicants comes up, I am constantly asked, ‘But why not just call and verify past employment?’” says Angela Roberts, Head of Recruiting Operations at craresources, a clinical research associate (CRA) recruitment firm. “That seems like a reasonable question. By all means, you should do background checks—but such checks and employment verifications aren’t always going to protect you from candidates whose resumes are littered with details of fabricated positions and achievements.”
Never assume the companies listed on candidates’ resumes are real businesses, warns Roberts, who will address related topics at greater length, with a focus on the CRA role, in a forthcoming article for ACRP’s Clinical Researcher journal and in an ACRP Webinar in November.
“These ‘fake companies’ have folks who will answer the phone and ‘verify’ employment,” Roberts says. “We first noticed this trend in 2010, when CRA candidates from certain would-be previous employers consistently failed our competency assessments. As we dug deeper, we realized the companies didn’t exist, and that the candidates were fake job applicants who were using these bogus companies to represent monitoring experience they didn’t really have.”
To date, Roberts says craresources has identified 47 of these phony companies, with an additional 119 classified as highly suspicious.
“The trend of candidates using fake companies on their resumes is one of the most elusive and alarming trends we have seen,” Roberts adds.
These shell companies have websites, and often the individuals who set them up trick Google into assigning locations to them. The fraudulent companies may be so committed that they not only have staff members who answer phones to “verify” employment for candidates, but for an additional fee, they will provide positive references from “past supervisors,” Roberts notes.
In her Clinical Researcher article and webinar, Roberts will map out the most straightforward path to determining if a company is real in such situations, and what steps managers can take if any doubt remains at the end of the day.
However, even if a suspicious-seeming company turns out to be real, hiring organizations should be diligent with background checks and reference checks (which should always be verbal), Roberts says. “I am finding more and more companies fail to conduct thorough reference and background checks, when these should go well beyond looking just for criminal history and employment verification,” she explains. “Often, the operations managers waiting for new hires don’t know these important steps are being skipped or sidestepped, perhaps because the human resources office has a cap on what it will spend on such efforts. This can result in a bad hire even though someone looked really good on paper.”
Edited by Gary Cramer
