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Recruiting workers from outside the UK has become harder since Brexit, but employers with skilled jobs are still looking for the best talent around the globe to fill vacancies. Despite this, a recent survey has shown that around half of the members of staff arriving from overseas have no background vetting at all, compared with three quarters of staff from the UK. As well as putting companies at risk of employing illegal workers, there are several other drawbacks to this strategy.

Right to Work

The main risk factor in employing staff from overseas is that they do not have the legal right to be in the UK in the first place or work here. The legal situation here is strange; it is not a legal requirement to check nationality of staff. However, it is illegal to employ illegal workers, so checking up on nationality and visa status has become the default position for most employers. If you don’t bother to check up on the status of your workers, you will have no defence as an employer if it is later found that the person is in the UK illegally. If you have checked and have proof that someone has showed you a forged or altered document, you will probably be able to avoid a fine.

Validating Qualifications

Every country around the world has a different education system and this is perhaps what is putting off employers from verifying degrees or school-leaving qualifications. Employers are put off doing this for many reasons: language barrier when trying to talk to schools or universities overseas, the time constraints, the general difficulty of knowing where to start in an unfamiliar qualification. But if you are employing for a position where the qualification is critical to someone’s success in the role, then there should be a process for checking properly.

References

Candidates who have recently arrived in the UK or are still overseas at the time of application will quite naturally give names and addresses of referees in their home country. If these referees don’t speak English, getting a reference can be tricky. Furthermore, other countries may have different laws and policies about what can be said in a reference for a job, and they have no obligation to comply with any requests from a British employer.

Contract Versus Permanent

The employment survey also highlighted a huge discrepancy between temporary or contract workers, and permanent employees. A much lower percentage of contractors were screened when compared with full-time staff. This situation has become even more muddy with the increase of remote working during the pandemic, where employers have not been able to meet with staff and verify identity in person. Many contractors wish to take on a job in the UK but work remotely from their home country. This situation is not unusual but can open up a whole can of worms in terms of tax liability, employed or self-employed status, and illegal working. Always get specialist legal or HR advice in these situations.

Although background screening or pre-employment checking are commonly used terms in private sector companies, governments and security jobs will often use the term vetting instead. In October 2020 the UK government issued new guidance, designed to let both applicants and recruiters within government know a bit more about the security vetting process.

Security vetting is all about minimising risks in government roles where security concerns have to be taken into consideration. This could mean a role which involves going into a high-risk site such as a power station or airport, a role which has access to classified documents or IT systems. The aim of vetting is to reassure employers that they can trust the people they are working with. Vetting in these situations is not something which is done once at the point of recruitment and then forgotten; departments will have an ongoing process of vetting on a regular basis for as long as someone holds a role which involves needing security clearance.

Delivering Vetting

Vetting is so important to the UK government that there is a special body set up to manage security vetting within government departments. This body is called United Kingdom Security Vetting (UKSV) and is part of the Cabinet Office. There is lots of information online about the structure of the organisation and how they operate should you be interested in finding out more.

What Will They Ask For?

UKSV will ask applicants to complete a form giving basic personal details such as name, address, and date of birth, along with more information about your parents and siblings, an employment history, and address history. They will also ask about criminal convictions, similar to a DBS check in other situations. If your job involves a higher level of security clearance, they might also ask about your financial situation, and look more deeply into links with political or pressure groups which people may have links to.

Why Do They Need to Know All This?

The aim of the screening process is to minimise risk and maintain national security. When UKSV are undertaking the screening, they are not judging choices you may have made in the past or are looking for the right or wrong answers. However, in particular they are trying to get to the bottom of the following issues:

• Overseas residence – not necessarily a concern but could be if you have spent extended periods in countries which the UK has poor relations with.
• Spending – are you living beyond your means which could mean you make rash decisions to fund your lifestyle?
• Blackmail – without judgement, the UKSV wants to understand whether there is anything in your private life which could lead to you being blackmailed.
• Associations – even though you may not be considered any security risk yourself, are there any questionable characters among your friends and family who might influence you?

The UKSV also guarantees that the questions they ask will be relevant and reasonable given the position under consideration and will inform applicants in advance about the process.

There’s no shortage of jokes about lying on your CV, and the reason why most of us chuckle when we hear them is because we all know someone who’s inflated their GCSE grades or exaggerated their experience. It’s seen as fair game to embellish your CV, as long as it gets you the job. Employers know it goes on though, and surveys estimate that as many as 65% of CVs have mistruths on them. Some minor lies won’t matter; do you really care whether an applicant plays the piano or paints watercolours in their spare time? But other lies are more serious and spotting them is the key to effective recruitment.

Check Their Social Media

If you have any doubts about a candidate’s career history, a good place to look is somewhere like LinkedIn, or other social media sites. LinkedIn in particular is widely used by job hunters, and if you suspect that a candidate has created a job history or given themselves additional responsibilities, you can check to see whether their job history on LinkedIn matches what they are telling you. Many candidates are advised to keep work posts off their personal Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter feeds, but it’s still worth having a look to make sure there’s nothing which contradicts what they have said on their CV.

Mind the Gap

Candidates know that employers are suspicious about gaps on CVs without any explanation. Many will just adjust the periods of employment to cover gaps but many slip up, claiming to be employed by two companies at the same time, for example. Others will try to cover a gap by saying they were volunteering or travelling, so you should try to corroborate this. Gaps on a CV aren’t necessarily a problem – but lying about the reason for that gap might be.

Mismatch Between Education and Work History

If a candidate appears to have a degree in one subject, then has jumped between several positions in completely unrelated industries, then you should be suspicious. Of course, it’s possible to go from a Geology degree to a position in marketing then into banking and finally into civil engineering, but it’s not the norm. Don’t automatically write them off as a liar, but the jumping between several industries or doing jobs completely unrelated to their education is definitely something you might want to explore in depth at the interview stage.

Waffle and Unclear Language

People know that it’s wrong to lie on CVs, so will try to justify it to themselves by waffling, using lots of jargon or inserting buzzwords in the hope you’ll be impressed. But when the language used is unclear and non-specific, it can be impossible to work out what an employee actually did. Again, this is something which you definitely need to go into an interview, asking for specific examples of responsibility to get to the bottom of what someone did on a daily basis. A skilled interviewer should be able to pick up quickly if the candidate really did leaf a big team on a million-pound project, or not.

Security clearance can mean a lot of different things, but in the UK is generally used when dealing with jobs in defence and national security. These jobs are sensitive in nature and could involve being privy to secret information or national secrets. People employed to work in the Army, or in the control room of a nuclear power station have to be thoroughly checked out to make sure that they themselves don’t pose any risk to national security.

There are four different levels of security clearance, and the level required for each candidate will depend on the position under consideration, or their level within a given organisation. These are:

• Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) – the entry level, least detailed form of security checking.
• Security Check (SC)
• Counter-Terrorism Check (CTC)
• Developed Vetting (DV)

BPSS

BPSS is the standard pre-employment checking for people who are applying to work in government departments, even those who won’t have access to anything particularly sensitive. People applying for jobs which need BPSS clearance need a basic criminal records check, must prove their identity, satisfy the conditions of a right to work check, and be able to account for their employment history over the past three years. BPSS checks are usually only done once, when taking up your first government job.

SC

Security Check is a next step up in checking and is also sometimes known as national security vetting. You can’t apply for this sort of clearance on yourself; only your employer can apply for this on your behalf. Security clearance applies to contractors as well as to permanent employees. Employees will have the BPSS screening detailed above, but also a credit reference check, and will have to complete a questionnaire giving information about their friends, relatives and any political or pressure groups they may belong to.

Counter Terrorist Check

This clearance is used to check people who are going to be working in close proximity to public figures, for example in Parliament, or Buckingham Palace. Someone having CTC clearance will complete a range of screening forms, allowing the authorities to look into their background in some detail, including criminal records checks, security questionnaire and a MI5 questionnaire about your relatives too. Due to the in-depth nature of these checks, and the need to look into criminal records in some depth, roles requiring a counter terrorist check are usually restricted to people who have lived in the UK for at least three years.

Developed Vetting

This is the highest level of vetting, reserved for people who are going to be working with information classed as secret, or Top Secret. Developed vetting requires someone to have been in the UK for at least 9 years out of the previous 10, and to supply lots of information about their employment history, nationality, parents, spouse, and criminal records. A criminal record may not be a bar to passing clearance, as the authorities are more interested in whether the applicant, or their family appears in the security services information about radical groups or terrorism.

Every company will have its own approach to how they check up on people who are applying for jobs within their organisation. There are only a few situations in which employers have a legal obligation to screen candidates before hiring, so companies are free to make their own decisions about how to approach screening. The key concept which should be guiding this decision is called Risk Tolerance.

What’s the Risk in Recruiting?

When you stop to think about it, choosing the right person to join your organisation is a risky business. If you’re lucky, you could get a competent, professional person who brings new ideas and fits in perfectly with the rest of your team. However, get it wrong, and the consequences could be serious. You might get someone who has exaggerated their qualifications or experience, and just can’t do the job. Or even worse, someone who is actively trying to get a job in order to defraud your company. Screening can’t eliminate every risk, but certainly reduces the chances of getting it drastically wrong.

Assess the Potential Damage

Although the risk of getting the wrong person is damage to your company, not all positions carry the same level of risk. A very junior member of staff, who doesn’t have access to the company’s bank accounts and doesn’t deal with customers, has limited potential to cause damage if you get the decision wrong. Junior members of staff are also easier to replace. If, however you are recruiting for a more senior member of staff, it’s definitely worth the time and effort to conduct a thorough screen of their past.

What Should We Be Looking At?

There are lots of strategies which employers can use to check up on people who are applying for jobs. It’s important though to have a written policy about employment screening and apply this fairly to avoid accusations of discrimination. Some of the “quick-wins” in pre-employment screening are basics such as checking references by calling up previous employers to verify job titles and employment dates rather than relying on an emailed reference. If having a specific qualification is important for the role, it usually just takes a call or email to an exam board or professional body to check the claims are genuine.

Other checks are not so easy to arrange and will depend on the role under consideration. It is illegal, for example, to request an enhanced disclosure check on someone whose role does not involve anything known as regulated activity. Similarly, it would be hard to justify running a credit check on a worker who has no access to accounts or cash. Many employers choose to use an external screening company to help them decide what levels of screening are required for each role, to help you keep on the right side of the law, and strike the right balance between not checking enough, and spending money on an excessive level of checking given the responsibility.