Thursday, September 07, 2006

Skill and Resume Verification by NASSCOM?

Came across this post about NASSCOM creating a repository of information about skills of IT and BPO employees. While it solves some problems for companies and some for employees (Think lemons market...), it can potentially create a lot of trouble if not used properly. It says that the employees would decide about who can view their personal information, but do you think that a poor BPO employee can stop anyone from viewing his or her information.
Other problem would be deciding who updates the information with NASSCOM and the frequency of these updates. Lets say an ordinary IT worker, has learnt a new skill and now wants to update the skills registry, maybe to switch jobs. How would this information be authenticated. The current employer would be reluctant to update even the current skills of his/her employer on the repository. Well they can't even do it successfully on intra company databases except for a few companies. Consider this,1) why would a company, which is fighting attrition, want to update its employees skills on a common database so that others could simply poach these employees. This could also lead to a few companies blackmailing its employees. 2) If on the other hand, the employees themselves update their own skills, there would be no difference at all from the current situation or make the current situation worse. I see huge 'Agency Costs' in both these situations.

The answer is educating people about the pitfalls of resume fudging, and relying on honor system. Performace, in the first 3 months should give ample proof of the fudging if that happens.
A possible solutions could be, a registry for those who are found to have fudged data. The onus of proving the fudging should lie with the company.

2 comments:

Abu AbdAllah, admin at prayinjamat.com said...

You point out some real hurdles to employment/education verification services. But aren't they the same hurdles that are faced in verifying a person's credit history?

Why can't the safeguards in that sector be implemented in this one?

Anonymous said...

for one

your credit history is only an objective picture of hundreds of your transactions. even if one or two people have shown malice in reporting it gets tided over by the rest.

However, there are real emotions involved when you switch jobs. So for example your relationship with your immediate supervisor can determine what gets reported to the skills registry.

Companies cant even get their internal databases on employee skills in order or updated. consider the odds of trying to update an external database when they know what it would be used for.

why would they even want to do it because it would simply be used by competitors to hunt for their best employees.

Kapil

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