Identity Verification – The First Line of Defense in the Background Screening Process

Recruiting top talent is a critical component to the success of any company.  Human Resource professionals undergo lengthy measures to ensure they have the right candidate for the position.

How do you know if a candidate is who they say they are? 

Identity fraud is the fastest growing crime in the U.S. In the last 10 years, there have been over 7,500 data breaches of millions of records, exposing personal identifiable information (PII) such as SSN, driver’s license, medical or financial records.  The recent Equifax data breach, exposing over 143 million American consumers, exemplifies the magnitude of the problem.

Given the large number of data breaches exposing personal identifiable information (PII) for millions of consumers, combined with advancements in graphics technology, it has become easier for a deceptive candidate to assume another person’s identity and falsify a government-issued ID. Coupled with the growing insider threat to businesses and compliance requirements in regulated industries, employers must “Know Their Candidates” to protect their company and employees.

Accurate identification and identity data are keys to helping protect your company from the ever increasing risk of fraud and impersonation.

 Ripple effect of data breaches

In February of 2017, a hacker created a job seeker account in a popular job board and then exploited a misconfiguration in the application code to gain unauthorized access to certain PII of other job seekers (user names, dates of birth and Social Security Numbers). The hacker was able to breach the job board system in ten states.

The multiple effects of this type of data breach are broad and include:

• Financial cost to the breached entity
• Financial impact to the breached individuals
  • Direct or indirect theft
  • Damage to credit
  • Identity theft
• Financial impact to:
  • Creditors
  • Merchants
  • Other consumers
  • AND employers

What’s a company to do?

Candidate authentication is the first line of defense in combating identity fraud and related criminal activity, and should be the foundation of an organization’s candidate background screening process.

Employers now have the availability of ground breaking identity authentication technology that forensically authenticates a candidate’s government issued ID and compares it to the candidate’s self-photograph using biometric facial recognition to authenticate their identity.

Implementing this technology as the first step before the background check will help to catch fake IDs and combat the increasing risk of fraud exposure and impersonation.

Identity Authentication technology combines machine learning ID verification and identity verification, along with biometric facial recognition, providing a complete solution to verify the identity of your candidates.

A successful and efficient Identify Authentication program relies heavily on the candidate experience.  A simple mobile enabled process for capturing the candidate ID and self photograph will help streamline identity verification and accelerate time to hire.

Worldwide support for government issued IDs

For global nationals and companies that hire employees with international government issued IDs, it’s critical that the technology you implement be able to support varying types of government issued IDs throughout the world. The time and cost savings benefits of onboarding candidates with secure identity authentication cannot be overstated. If a fraudster provides false information that is not uncovered in the background research, the background check results will be inaccurate. As background checks become more ubiquitous, there are people who know that when fraudulent personal data is not discovered and corrected it becomes difficult to positively match identifiers in criminal records. The front-end potential of an ID authentication process is a high impact event for companies.

The government issued IDs used in front-end ID authentication contain correct dates of birth which assist in the identification process. In addition, if there is a criminal record involved in the background check, the photo ID will help in determining if the criminal record is a match with the Department of Corrections photo.

To learn more about issues involved with identity fraud and cutting edge identity authentication technology available to protect your company, download Cisive’s new White Paper, The Case for Identity Verification in the Hiring Process.

 

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