Look within & around before your job hunt

Your prospective employers will invariably ask you to provide references to verify your credentials. Therefore, it is advisable that before you set out hunting for a job, you look within yourself and carry out a check. This will help you to discern grey areas and rectify them.

Aspects that any employer likes to confirm are your educational and professional qualifications; employment history; character antecedents; performance capabilities; movable and immovable assets; criminal and court records; health & well-being; and even credit worthiness. They could well find out more about you than your mother knew; the list could be quite exhaustive, particularly if you are going to be handling confidential information.  However, it would be largely contingent on the employer and the job involved.

It is considered pertinent to mention that every prospective employer will not carry out a very detailed verification. But since they seek to decrease the risks in hiring, increase the quality of hire and ensure compliance of rules and regulations, they will definitely conduct background checks. Therefore, it will not be a bad initiative to discern and distinguish your footing on important facts and figures so that you are appropriately geared up.

Services of an investigative agency or direct contact with the references you provide are the more common means that companies use for employee verification. Of late, searches on social networking sites and the internet have also come to be used for the purpose. In order to preclude any unfavourable situation from developing at a later stage, it should be your endeavour to detect likely mismatches and pieces of apprehension that your employer may find out in the process of judging your candidature.

Talking of the internet, you too can search for information pertaining to your profile and see if there are any incomplete or incorrect details appearing. There could also be factually incorrect information appearing on social media sites like Linkedin or Facebook. It needs no emphasis to affirm that appearing of inaccurate and incorrect information related to you, inadvertent or otherwise can have a devastating effect on the opinion being ascertained of you by any prospective employer. 

You should also make sure that your professional records are proper and truthful. The importance of your resume is immense; in fact it focuses on you and your past, but has a great bearing on your future prospects. Therefore, you must make certain that each and every bit of information included in it is precise and truthful. Remember that even a trivial lapse, by oversight or otherwise would prompt a prospective employer to believe that similar gaffes would exist in the entire paper. Needless to state, this would put your candidature at great risk. Considering the foregoing, it is imperative that whatever you put on your resume is factual and not exaggerated or inflated; there should invariably be supporting documents to substantiate all your assertions. In case supporting documents are not available, you could well procure them straight away.

You should also be certain that the references provided by you in your resume or otherwise have been spoken to by you. All telephone numbers and addresses should have their acquiescence for use by you.

There are many employers and recruiters who also verify your credit worthiness from banks and financial institutions. You should make it a point that there are no defaults against you.

It is always better to not lose a good job because of poor findings of a background check, which, in the current times is a hard actuality of business. You can avoid adverse ramifications by taking corrective actions in advance. This is an indispensable component of your preparation to bring your job hunt to a winning completion.

In short, prior to your job hunt, you need to confirm that everything that you claim and put across in black and white is factual. This will remove all apprehensions in your mind and make you feel extra self-assured when you move ahead to get the job that you have been aspiring for. After all, you simply cannot afford to be ambushed at a later stage.