Firms hunt down the CV cheats

Financial services firms in the UK are scrutinising the accuracy of CVs more closely than ever, as new Financial Services Authority's regulations come into force. They strengthen a trend towards more stringent checks that began in 1995, when the trader Nick Leeson bankrupted Barings. The firm had employed him without knowing that there were a number of court judgments against him for unpaid debts.

The head of human resources at a large private bank says: 'Some people who apply for jobs are naive. They don't seem to realise that we might check the smallest detail of their CV, even down to which month they left a company 15 years ago, and why they left.'

Most banks outsource the business of checking CVs to companies that specialise in the field. One of them is PeopleRisk, whose chief executive Richard Leworthy, says: 'Material inaccuracies occur in about one CV in four.

'Of those, half can quickly be shown to be innocent mistakes. But the other half require further checking, which sometimes reveals deliberate lying.'

Some people cannot resist the temptation to exaggerate their pay. 'This is particularly true in financial services, where a bonus might mysteriously migrate from one period to another, to make the candidate look as highly paid as possible,' says Leworthy.

PeopleRisk routinely checks how much a person was paid by the simple method of ringing up an HR manager, perhaps from a job many years in the past, and quizzing them about it.

In the same way the company checks out the exact nature of a person's job, this time by going to a line manager. Some candidates are caught out saying that they spearheaded a product launch, for example, when all they did was give advice from the sidelines.

Academic qualifications are also a classic area for trying it on. Degrees at 2.2 level mutate into 2.1s with surprising frequency and sometimes a qualification from an impressive-sounding institution turns out to be the kind that you can buy for 50, perfectly legally, without opening a textbook.

David McKay of PeopleRisk says: 'We are often proactive. People in financial services have backgrounds from all over the world, so we'll offer our opinion about a university in Australia, for example, that a UK employer might never have heard of.'

Once an employer has discovered a problem with a CV, they must then decide what to do about it. One managing director says that a few years ago he was appalled to discover that an existing senior employee who claimed to be an Oxford University graduate had never been near the place. He decided to keep him, because he liked him. But if it happened nowadays, he says, he might have fired him.

David Spencer-Butler, managing director of Financial and Personnel Research, another firm that checks CVs, says: 'I think companies are less likely to be tolerant of lies and inaccuracies than they were a few years ago.'

The new FSA regulations, which came into force in December, are partly responsible for this changing attitude.

They place personal responsibility, for the first time, on executives to ensure that their staff are suitable for their jobs. If they fail to do so, they risk being fined or banned from working.

The FSA has also widened the categories of 'approved persons' who need its permission to do certain jobs. They now include finance directors and risk managers.

Mike Hartwell, a director of the executive search firm Sheffield Haworth, says: 'For years, financial services firms used to take people's CVs on trust. Now human resources departments are more vigilant because they know they are on the chopping block.'

Scrutiny of CVs can go well beyond a person's professional and academic background. Even low- level employees are likely to have a credit check run against their name. So a question such as 'have you ever been refused credit?' should be answered with scrupulous accuracy.

Very senior employees can find their sex lives and political views are put under the microscope, to avoid the risk of of embarrassing headlines that reflect badly on their company.

Jonathan Skan, of the headhunter Egon Zehnder, says: 'For some employers, it is part of due diligence to know about the stability of the private life in the context of a very demanding role.'

The internet has made the task of checking CVs quicker and easier, according to PeopleRisk.

The company offers employers an online system to enable them to monitor at a glance which details have been verified and which need investigation.

Some human resources specialists believe that in future everyone in the workforce will have a CV 'passport'.

The details will be validated by a widely trusted organisation and the passports will be accepted by all employers, removing the need for repeat checking every time someone moves jobs.

Perhaps all this will make the world a less colourful place. There must be plenty of high-flyers who would never have become successful if they had cared about something as mundane as writing an accurate CV. But for the moment CVs remain full of surprises, as a letter received by the headhunter Napier Scott attests.

It ran: 'Dear Sir, My CV is accurate except that I am not 36, I am 63. This will account for it showing that I was employed 10 years before I was born. This aside, my CV is a true representation of my history and I am resentful that you should have thought otherwise.'