After Accenture India’s layoffs due to fake documents and experience letters, a similar event happened at Cognizant India. As per an ETNow report, Cognizant India has said that it had a 6 percent involuntary attrition in Q3.
As per the report, the head of Cognizant India Rajesh Nambiar said that failed background checks are the reason behind high involuntary attrition which means the company decides if the employees stay or leave.
The layoff numbers have increased during the last few months because of failed background and moonlighting and these incidents are becoming more common because companies resumed their traditional way of working from the office which resulted increasing in background checks of new employees.
Recently, a few days before Cognizant’s case, another big tech company Accenture India also announced huge layoffs because of the same reason – they also found that the employees have forged their documents. In a statement, it said, “We have taken action to ensure that there will be no impact on our ability to serve our clients.”
Usually, companies don’t do background checks because of multiple reasons which include a delay in hiring. If they do, they have to check all the candidates who got selected for the jobs in the company. The actual problem lies when some candidates do not intend to join the company and the investigation goes in vain. Companies avoid such checkings as they want quick hires so that candidates have a lower inclination to hunt for new offers.
“With the entire recruitment process moving online due to the pandemic, cases of fake documentation and resumes have increased significantly. This calls for stringent and thorough background checks on the part of employers,” Vikram Shroff, head of HR law at law firm Nishith Desai Associates, told the publication.
Saravanan Balasundaram, CEO of talent consultancy firm Han Digital, said “some clients wanted to onboard candidates immediately after they cleared client interviews because of demand pressures. Some candidates were unwilling to share their bank statements (to check if they were receiving regular salaries earlier). We dug deeper and found gaps in their employment history, with several omissions in their resumes.”
However, after the layoff by Accenture India, the company later clarified that they will continue to hire and honor existing offers for qualified candidates. These scenarios have increased after the post the Covid 19 pandemic as most experts believe.
Beyond fake letters and forged documents, mass layoffs have also been seen in other companies like Twitter, Meta, Brainly, and so on. While the companies have sacked employees primarily to cut down on costs, it has affected thousands of workers as they went out of jobs in no time.
