Of all the categories of pre-employment evaluation, past employment poses the biggest problem for employers. This is because employment checks must cover length of service, job title, company details, salary, and reasons for leaving.

Pre-Employment Assessment: 1. ‘Extended’ employment dates often hide unemployment

Candidates who seriously mislead potential employers might, for example, try to reduce, or completely eliminate, long periods of unemployment or imprisonment by “stretching” the dates of employment on their CV, sometimes by years. In addition to raising questions about what they were actually doing during the period in question, this also casts doubt on the candidate’s honesty and integrity.

Other applicants will claim to be working for businesses that no longer exist and offer a reference from an employer prior to the closure of that business. I’ve also come across others creating fake business websites and waiting at the end of the line for a verification call.

Pre-Employment Assessment: 2. The reasons for leaving can hide the truth

Another area that employers increasingly need to look at is the reasons for leaving, mainly due to an increase in layoff rates. No one is proud of being laid off, let alone being laid off, and that is why so many applicants will try to hide the real reasons why they left their previous employer. It is one thing not to indicate in a CV the reasons for leaving a position, but quite another to lie about it when asked. Even firing itself is not always necessarily detrimental to a candidate’s chances, but when one lies about it, it certainly raises questions about his character.

And when it comes to reporting current income, employees are increasingly taking advantage of the fact that employers are now providing less and less information on standard references. In fact, most will provide just the dates of employment and the job title. Therefore, employees allow themselves to inflate their salaries, thinking that they will be able to get away with such lies.

Pre-Employment Assessment: 3. Job titles can be a tricky area

When it comes to job titles, candidates play faster and more relaxed with these than with any other aspect of a CV, but employers should also be aware that this is also a tricky area from an HR perspective, and in which genuine mistakes are often made. Because of this, HR data systems can occasionally contain incorrect job titles, and such errors can only be discovered by cross-checking.

Also, remember that in times of recession and unemployment, job candidates face a greater temptation to twist the truth to create more impressive CVs, and employee screening will protect employers from hiring someone who is not what they seem .