Pulling the wool over HR’s eyes

Leading commercial and private information companies report a growing problem of academic and work qualification fraud in China. Adrian Ashurst, Founder of Worldbox Business Intelligence—providing background checks globally—commented, “A range of international company clients operating in China have found that senior people they had hired on the strength of their CVs did not have the experience and academic qualifications required to fulfill their positions, after checking their credentials.” He added, “Falsified information by applicants in the business and educational sectors is skyrocketing.” There is a similar trend amongst Hong Kong jobseekers—a recent survey, conducted by eeVoices, of Hong Kong university and college graduates showed 62% admitted to resume exaggeration.

The latest Q4 Hudson Report on Employment and HR Trends in China surveyed over 1,500 employers across Asia, and found that more than two-thirds of business respondents across all sectors had encountered candidates being dishonest about their background or experience in their resumes in China. The figure of 68% recorded in China is far higher than that recorded in the other Asian markets surveyed.

According to the report, respondents in the Media, PR & Advertising Sector were the most likely to have experience of candidates exaggerating or falsifying information in their resumes, 91% of candidates said they had done so. This was attributed to the very high churn rate of workers in this industry, who often make bold claims to present themselves as being less deserving of the axe than their co-workers.

At 66%, the Banking and Financial Services Sector also yielded a high proportion of respondents indicating candidates had submitted false information about their remuneration packages. One reason behind this may be due to the rapid expansion of the sector, with numerous international banks currently entering the market. This has provided employees in the sector with multiple job opportunities and many candidates are now more open to switching jobs to increase their remuneration—many exaggerating their current pay levels to help strengthen their negotiating position.

Both the Consumer and Manufacturing & Industrial Sectors reported a similar numbers of respondents who had encountered dishonesty on the part of candidates, at 64%. The Consumer Sector, being well-established, often has more experienced HR teams that can more readily identify falsified resumes. In addition, recruitment specialists operating in this field are highly effective at verifying candidates’ backgrounds before making recommendations to employers. This figure might have been higher if not for the experience of HR recruiting.

Employers in the Manufacturing and Industrial Sector often have highly technical requirements when filling vacancies and there is a significant crossover of candidates between companies, making it relatively simple to verify information provided on CVs. According to the report, these factors mean that candidates from this sector are more likely to be honest when preparing their resumes.

• After a plane crash in August killed 42 people in northeast China, officials discovered that 100 pilots who worked for the airline’s parent company had falsified their flying histories.
• An editorial published earlier this year in the British medical journal, The Lancet, warned that faked or plagiarized research posed a threat to President Hu Jintao’s vow to make China a ‘research superpower’ by 2020.
• Earlier this year, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou released results from a 20-month experiment it conducted by running plagiarism-detection software across a number of scientific journals, which found nearly a third of all submissions were suspected of being pirated from previously published research. In some cases, more than 80% of a paper’s content was deemed unoriginal.
• In a study of 32,000 scientists by the China Association for Science and Technology last summer, more than 55% said they knew someone guilty of academic fraud.

Respondents to the Hudson research, who said they had encountered candidates falsifying their resumes, were also asked about the specific areas in which dishonesty or exaggeration occurred. Remuneration packages—59%, and Job responsibilities and achievements—55%, were found to be the areas in which candidates were most likely to distort the facts.

This is in contrast to employers in the IT&T sector, who seem much more trusting of job applicants, and are least likely to carry out background checks. Only 42% of employers in this sector felt that background checks were ‘very important’.

Chinese educators have indicated that the culture of cheating takes root in high school, where the competition for slots in the country’s best colleges is unrelenting and high marks on standardised tests are the most important criterion for admission. The Ministry of Education announced two major antifraud campaigns in the ‘90s, but the bodies they established to tackle the problem have yet to mete out any punishments.

Dishonesty about academic qualifications, cited by 42% of respondees in the Hudson Report, was more than twice as common in China as in the other markets surveyed. This chimes with numerous reports from companies specialising in background checks that they are experiencing a sharp uptrend in the number of falsified qualifications submitted by young Chinese students applying to study at international universities. Student checks can be broken into two tiers: a regular check where students have little or no work history to check, and checking MBA students’ claims of qualifications and their related working experience.

The padded resume of Tang Jun, the millionaire former head of Microsoft China and something of a national hero, was widely reported this summer to have falsely claimed to have received a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology. This story was broken by Fang Shimin (方是民), better known by his net-name Fang Zhouzi (方舟子), who has been fighting a lonely crusade exposing numerous frauds in China’s scientific and academic communities. Zhouzi’s website, New Threads, has reportedly exposed more than 900 instances of fakery, some involving university presidents and nationally lionised researchers.

Tang was subsequently quoted by the Beijing News as saying, “Losers cheat some people and get caught. Winners cheat the whole world all the time.” His supporters argued that it was fine for him to make such a mistake as long as his admirable business success was real.

This growing phenomenon is not limited to the mainland, and Hong Kong jobseekers seem just as dishonest. A recent eeVoices survey of university and college graduates in Hong Kong showed that of the 62% who admitted to resume exaggeration, one-third said ‘they did it a lot’. According to eevoices, statistics gathered over the last four years indicate 46% of background checks they conduct reveal exaggerated or false claims or result in unfavourable references.

In the Hudson research, employers who had encountered candidates falsifying information, were also asked about the specific areas in which dishonesty or exaggeration occurs. The findings revealed that remuneration packages, job responsibilities and achievements were the areas in which jobseekers lied the most, accounting for 59% and 55%, respectively.

Dishonesty about academic qualifications, was cited in 42% of cases in China. This figure is more than double that recorded in other markets surveyed. Candidates in the Media, PR & Advertising Sector were found to be the biggest culprits when it came to exaggerated claims on their CVs. With 64% lying about years of experience, and 88% exaggerating job responsibilities/achievements, this is much higher than in any other sector. As noted, many agencies are very sensitive to workload and candidates are often in the position of seeking new roles after obtaining relatively limited experience. They therefore tend to exaggerate several aspects of their resumes.

After Media, PR & Advertising, the IT&T Sector has the highest proportion of respondents reporting that candidates are dishonest about their job responsibilities/achievements and years of experience—61% and 43%, respectively. Many IT professionals also work on specific projects and may exaggerate what they have achieved when applying for new roles. Within the Banking & Financial Services Sector, a high proportion of respondents said that candidates tended to lie about their current and previous remuneration packages.

According to data gathered by eeVoices job applicants in Hong Kong were most likely to lie about performance issues on their job applications, with 19% indicating they had been dishonest. Incorrect education claims were the next most likely cause for concern in 15% of cases. Inconsistent position, employment period and/or salary accounted for 10% of fraudulent CVs, with lies about ‘dishonesty and unethical conduct’ being present in 2% of CVs. The data was gathered from a wide range of industries including: banking, luxury brands, logistics, IT, hospitality, education, apparel, property management, global software giants and a host of SMEs. However, Greg Basham, CEO, eeVoices Limited warned, “Employers should not find any solace in these statistics, as organisations who are known for rigorous pre-employment screening drive these numbers right down to where the frequency and severity of the exaggerated claims is very low.” He added, “It is not unusual for an SME, with no prior history of checking backgrounds, to start off with over 70% exaggerated claims from applicants, but after a few months of screening their statistics will start to mirror the industry averages.”

Leo Ma, COO, eeVoices who has worked in pre-employment screening in both North America and Asia commented, “There is a higher rate of false education claims in this region [Asia] than in North America because this region has a shorter history of verifying education and claims on resumes. Other exaggerations in resumes run about the same rates across the globe.”

• Fake PhD Fellowship from a world class prestigious science institute—a CEO who graduated from the same US University wondered why this person’s PhD was not on his office wall with the other degrees.
• Fake degree certificates and transcripts—right down to the same paper and watermark used by the university.
• Fake Masters Degree—one person claimed to have MBAs in Accounting and Finance—but it was discovered that, while enrolled in both programmes, neither was actually completed.
• Mail-order Degrees and MBAs issued from non-accredited institutions.
• Fake Masters Degree issued from a US-based medical certification agency for a doctor. It was later discovered that work they had conducted during the same period was all in the UK. In fact, the person had left the UK due to criminal convictions for theft, went on to the US where they repeated the offences, before trying their luck in Hong Kong.

Bashan conceded, “The tragedy for employers is that these people with something to hide will just go to the employer down the street and will repeat the same problems all over again.”

Many employers in China have followed suit and adopted much more stringent background checks on potential employees following the Tang Jun story. This has inevitably meant investing significant time and money in crosschecking job applicants’ credentials and credibility. Qiu Jialu, an HR specialist at a real estate investment company in China, said her organisation is stepping up investigations into potential employees’ background information. Qiu said, “Our company has strict procedures for recruitment, especially for those applying for high and middle-level positions. Now, we are planning to expand the scope of background checks to also cover those applying for rank-and-file positions.”

“Tang Jun’s case reflects a social problem. With the increasingly cut-throat competition, many people buy fake academic credentials to advance their careers,” said Zhu Shibo, Manager, Recruitment Service Centre, at the China International Intellectech Corporation Shanghai Foreign Enterprises Service Company. Zhu explained that her centre has received unprecedented commissions to investigate job applicants in recent years. She added, “The number of employers who hire our services for background investigation, which usually covers the highest educational qualification, criminal record and work experience, has doubled in the past two years.”

With HR background checks becoming more important than ever—it is becoming an essential part of HR to conduct in-depth background checks on all details in an applicant’s CV. Sometimes this is difficult on web-based subscription services or traditional search giants, such as Experian and Ashurst advised HR to look for partners who had a network of ground agents to help provide comprehensive background information on job applicants.

Research on existing directors of Chinese companies is normally conducted in the final stages of the selection process, but additional more in-depth research is sometimes required at a later stage. Fees tend to be highest for senior management checks because applicants’ education and work histories are generally more extensive than for people applying for normal positions.

Basham pointed out that exit surveys show one of the key triggers for top performers leaving their jobs is ‘the quality of new hires’. If new hires are less able than those who they replace, this is an early warning sign that this loyal, committed employee might soon start looking for new offers. Rigorous pre-employment practices result in better hires who stay longer and contribute more. In the long-run background checks play an important role in helping establish your brand as an employer. Think twice about that CV on your desk.