Background Checks & what others can learn from IT bigwigs

Hiring a serial offender as an employee is surely not the smartest thing to do, but that's just what Uber did, and many more might have done so considering the reports coming out of the shabby way in which 'Background Checks' (BGC) are done, if at all, by organizations across sectors.

And while everyone is at logger heads over whom to blame, what one can take a leaf out of is how IT companies do their BGC and why a zero tolerance policy is in place considering when the employees are supposedly 'white collar'- educated & hailing from 'good' families.

In IT, the BGC process scrutinizes everything starting from education, employment, medical and even criminal checks, and this has helped weed out many who were using fake certificates or hiding past information. The industry bodies are at the forefront, trying to streamline these checks, with NASSCOM coming up with NSR portal (National Skill Registry) that aims to serve as a central repository of every employee's past record and ensure an even tighter vigil and lower the time & money spent on such checks.

But then, this is not something new. What's there to learn, you may ask. Well, the answer is that almost all major IT players don't do the BGC themselves. Instead, they have helped spawn a good number of credible third party vendors who do the job for them, and these people are good because regular audits and checks by the IT giants ensures compliance. What our other industry fellows need to do is to work with them and ensure that the BGC process is further fine tuned to suit their demands, especially since it's easy in our country to 'fake' documents and for most blue collar employees hailing from small towns and villages, getting to know the reality will require some extra effort.

Some incidents act as watershed moments, and the uber rape case should ensure that we work together to minimize chances of such occurrences, be it in a taxi or in room. BGC is only one part, with technology providing more help to customers, such as a one touch emergency button. Drivers could also be told to inform call centers in case of drunk customers boarding their vehicle so as to ensure better security for both passenger and driver. I'm also sure the cab firms will come back with more safety measures, in fact, as I write this, Meru Cabs has announced that they are enhancing their security by putting in driver verification linked with Aadhaar....

In the end, the question arises if BGC is fool proof? No, it isn't and we in IT know it considering in the past, even we have been penetrated by past offenders and those with nefarious designs but a clean past. It is a sad reality that no amount of checks can predict when any employee could go rogue, but what it can give is an insight to ensure a 'no entry' for past offenders, and perhaps that is what's the need of the hour, along with some technical help to make our world a safer place.

**All views expressed are personal.