George O’Leary revelations enforce need for background checks

By now you’ve all probably read or heard about George O’Leary who had just been hired by Notre Dame as their new football coach only to resign in disgrace. He reputedly claimed to have a Masters Degree and to have played collegiate football, when in truth he had done neither.  I don’t want to waste a lot of time speculating as to the motivation of O’Leary or for that matter of other people who do the same thing.  The fact of life is a high percentage of resumes and applications contain untruths.  

Sometimes it’s more subtle such as an omission where there is a blank date as you review their chronology.  At other times it’s the use of a word such as attended such and such university.  Generally this means they did not have a B.A. or B.S. or may have only taken a course or two.

As an employer you are well advised to do significant background checking of a finalist for positions.  There are services that for a small amount of money can do academic verifications, check with Departments of Motor Vehicles (can expose an alcoholic or drug user), conduct drug test, credit checks and verify employment dates.  Most of these require the written permission of the person being checked.  If they object, you should be concerned.

Reference checking is much more in-depth than the above background checks.  However they are worthless if you are dependent on references that the candidate gives you.  Further if you are just calling the companies generally because of our litigious society, you are going to only get the equivalent of the military’s name, rank and serial number. 

What you really need is to talk to people who trust you and will reveal things that the above mentioned type of reference checking will not.  These people need assurance of total confidentiality.  Further you need to assure them that you are looking for consensus and that they are one of several references that you are calling.  Then you need to do what you just said. 

A search firm like ours that specializes within an industry has a lot of contacts that many companies might not, and such information is shared because of competence that we build up over 18 years of professional and confidential dealings.  We and others can be hired just to do such reference checking regardless of whose candidate it is. 

As an employer remember that while many hiring decisions are based on interview results, study after study indicates that it has the poorest correlation of actually predicting job success of any of the various criteria for doing such.  Meanwhile reference checking has the highest correlation with later success.  It’s the old adage that the best indication of the future is the past and the best way to ascertain the past is through in-depth references checking.

As a candidate I encourage you to state only facts, account for what otherwise might be a convenient omission and be careful not to deliberately infer things that are not so.  I often will ask a candidate if there is anything that I really need to know that isn’t on the resume that I might find through checking.  I further say that if they tell me now and tell me the reason for it the process might go on.  However, if I find out they are not telling me and I find out the process will most likely stop.