Indian BPO's fight CV fraud

India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, it appears, is always fighting bad press. It successfully fought the US and European backlash, just about came to terms with unionization, tided over data theft allegations, tackled allegations of ‘promiscuity’ in call centers and braved the fact that many of those who were arrested in the recent infamous Pune rave party were call center employees.

However, a more serious threat has been staring in its face for the past few months is that of people who have entered the IT-ITeS industry with fudged resumes and impersonation. Given that some BPOs conduct nearly 150 interviews a day, the threat is compounded many times over. In telephone interviews, impersonation is estimated to be in the range of 5-7%, while in face-to-face interviews it's about 1-2% of the total number of interviewees.

Falsification of resumes, impersonators, in brief people recruitment is the biggest problem faced by about 15-20% of the IT-ITeS sector. The problem needs to be tackled at a country level, wherein the government has a unique identification number like the social security number in the US for every citizen. Cases of potential employees falsifying resumes exists in all industries. However screening of employees is more stringent in BPOs mainly to maintain a secure environment where customer data is protected and to eliminate information security breaches.

To solve these problems, Nasscom had launched the National Skills Registry (NSR) in January 2006. The NSR is a centraliszd database of employees of the IT services and BPO companies, which many companies use to run background checks on their employees. Currently, a little over 50,000 employees from around 32 companies including Satyam, TCS, Genpact, WNS, Wipro and Firstsource have registered with the NSR, according to Nasscom.

An Accenture spokesperson commented, “We rely on third-party agencies to check up the identity of a candidate applying for a job with us, in the pre-interview stage.” If at any level, an interview with the global head or HR head is required, it is done through video-conferencing. Infosys BPO is said to insist on photographs along with applications so that nobody can impersonate him/her during the face-to-face interview.

Technologies like biometrics systems too may be helpful in future, but it's currently not that cost-effective. There is a growing interest in the use of biometric solution for cross verification of people at IT/ ITeS companies, schools and colleges. However the implementation of such solutions implies large infrastructure requirements like centrally-managed servers, expertise and other such, making it difficult for companies to introduce these solutions.

Psychometric and psychographic profiling too could provide succour. However, a BPO insider notes there’s no agreement on which tests have to be done and whether they comply with the laws. Besides, they may not reveal a criminal person’s intent. But the fact that BPOs have woken up to the problem may make impersonators think twice before they switch faces.

Source(s): Foundation of Information Security and Technology (FIST), Business Standard, NASSCOM