Last week I got the monthly bill from CV Checks R Us. It makes a Footballers’ Wives shopping bill look pitiful.
Initially, I thought that 200 for a basic check plus add-ons for optional extras, such as phoning a candidate’s alma mater, was a damned good deal. How wrong can one HR director be? Now I’m looking at £50,000 a month.
But that’s the price we pay for the CV zero-tolerance policy the board insists on. In a nutshell it’s one lie and you’re out. Or, more precisely, one lie and you’re not in.
The policy stems from a past hiring and firing of an oily besuited smoothy of a sales manager who turned out to have a police record. And it wasn’t Roxanne.
Since then anyone shortlisted for a post with manager in the title has to be vetted by CV Checks R Us. As that applies to 40% of our posts then the delays and cost over-runs are of a scale known only to Eurotunnel.
But it’s a third-rate HR director who can’t think of a better way.
That better way is the Candidate Resume Analysis Points Scorecard. Its beauty is its arithmetical simplicity.
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Instead of throwing out every applicant whose CV contains a porkie, the scorecard weighs and scores each fib. For example if a candidate says she has a 2:1 when she has a 2:2, that’s one point. If she lies about her age then it’s one point for every year greater or lesser than the truth.
Any score of five or less means the candidate stays in the hunt thus cutting candidate wastage. Some will call it Craps – I call it progress.
