Amazing Workplaces had an interaction with Mukesh Sharma, Founder, Validate Me to understand how this online platform can help organizations simplify and expedite the process of employee verification process while ensuring data accuracy. Below is an excerpt of our discussion.
When it comes to employee verification, what are the biggest problems the industry faces and has the pandemic exacerbated the problem given the geographic spread of candidates and the inability of verification companies to move around to check the background of potential employees?
One of the biggest challenges faced for employee verification is the high turnaround time, especially from the previous employment checks, which is a critical one for organizations. This takes up to 3 weeks and several reminders to the previous employer. The second is a high transaction cost to verify an individual’s background. These are a few amongst the many in the market that still plague the domain of employee verification.
What has been exacerbated with the pandemic is also in terms of the manual processes which traditionally caused a lack of consistency and authentication – this has only increased with the pandemic causing a lack of trust. For this very reason, a common digital platform like ValidateMe offers a seamless solution of providing a secure digital vault of employment and educational records. It offers a safe digital space for individuals and organizations to host, access, share, issue and validate documents. We also ensure end-to-end data privacy, i.e., the documents are not shared without the consent of the individual who has uploaded the same.
How is ValidateMe expected to disrupt the background verification process for companies? How do you go about checking the background — if you could take me through the steps?
ValidateMe is a ground-breaking blockchain-based digital vault of documents and their validations – stored immutably and forever. It is a platform on which the organizations can issue certificates to individuals, and individuals can share their validated documents with other organizations. The platform has the potential to disrupt many markets, the first being – background verification. This tool improves Productivity of the recruitment process in an organization.
Background verification, traditionally and even today, turns into weeks’ long process wherein an array of cumbersome practices constrains organizations to achieve a faster turnaround time. This is where ValidateMe steps in as the saviour – to provide a common digital platform for organizations and potential candidates to host, validate and issue authentic documents.
The process is extremely niche and simple –
For individuals:
- Individuals can seamlessly register themselves on our portal and upload their personal, educational and employment documents.
- Individuals can request their previous companies or educational institutions (issuers of the documents) for getting their documents validated.
- Individuals have the sole onus of sharing their documents to organizations of their choice
For organizations:
- Organizations are on-boarded after due diligence and a coherent verification process – becoming trusted partners of ValidateMe
- Organizations can request individuals to grant them access to their documents and can also request them to get validation from their previous employers/educational institutions.
- Organizations can also issue or publish documents directly through our portal for single and multiple candidates.
Are you leveraging technology in any other way apart from blockchain?
We are leveraging technologies like:
- Blockchain and smart contracts to immutably store the document’s validations and sharing by user to other users/companies.
- Encryption: To keep the sensitive information and documents of users hidden from everyone.
- IPFS: To keep the document tamperproof
ValidateMe is a SAAS based platform to give full power to users to control who can see their documents.
One area where discrepancy is rampant is the tenure of employment. How can digital platforms solve that problem? What are the other areas where technology can make a difference when it comes to background verification?
Tenure of employment is directly validated by the organization users on our platform. These organization users are trusted partner-organizations of ValidateMe – onboarded after a robust due-diligence. Shortening the turnaround time from weeks to hours and minutes and ensuring the authenticity of a document (issued digitally from the issuer directly) are the most crucial areas of impact.
What are some of the requests that you get from companies? The type of information that they want about prospective employees —has that changed in any way in recent years?
Primarily for Employee Recruitment, The process is pretty same and covers all information regarding him/her. Verification of all the information that he/she has shared. Documents verification (Personal, Educational and Employment Experience related) Over and above these, Companies Looking for in-depth Verification also ask for Criminal Records, Court Cases, Medical Conditions, Use of Drugs etc.
With Covid19, the situation has become little more difficult. With rising Unemployment, people resort to Document Tampering, hence the Role of Tools like ValidateMe has a bigger role to play.
Many industry experts say the digital platforms currently available in India for background verification are not able to provide quantity, quality, and cost-effectiveness for companies all at the same time. What do you think is lacking?
The aspect that seems lacking is a common platform for all validation needs – which ValidateMe offers seamlessly. The data is available from various and fragmented sources like past employers, educational institutes, etc. – adding on to the complexities of delayed on-boarding processes and more.
ValidateMe on the other hand, becomes a one-stop-shop for validating documents, attaining validations, conducting background verification, achieving a faster turnaround time, optimizing resources, keeping documents safe in our digital vault (powered by Blockchain), expediting hire-ready processes, etc. – all at once. Thus, digital platforms which offer background verification solely put importance on the said niche – whereas ValidateMe offers so much more by extending the branches of background verification. With ValidateMe, providing validated documents is a one-time activity – which lasts for a lifetime in our safe digital vault.