Each day, everyone at Springworks comes into work with a true passion for building products and tools to simplify the lives of hiring and recruiting managers. We are artists, innovators, achievers, and dreamers, with a one-track mind to fine-tune the products that we build on the blockchain, achieving precision. We showcase our team members, their roles, and what a typical day looks like for them through this series of posts. You can check all the posts here.
Sefali Lohani joined Springworks in Oct 2019. Before joining Springworks, she was working with a Background Verification company as a Team Leader.
Sefali was born in Bihar but has been brought up in Tamil Nadu and spent her entire childhood there. She’s done her schooling and graduation from there and has beautiful memories of her time there.
After completing graduation, she had to move to Bengaluru as her father had to shift there for work, and later, she got the job opportunity at Springworks.
Now, she just loves being here because of Bengaluru’s fantastic climate, work culture, and nature.
Let’s take a peek into the life of an Operations Ninja at Springworks!
What does your job entail?
I am responsible for conducting a smooth education and address-verification process for our SpringVerify clients by coordinating with the vendors, following up on those requests, and seeing them to completion.
What’s your favorite part of your work?
My favorite part is being able to do research(on education institutes) and getting to learn new things every day at work.
Research is all about discovering, learning, and sharing. It’s amazing to have a job where we are paid to constantly learn new things and use that learning to help improve the world around us.
What are the challenges that you face in your job?
High-level delays can happen at many points in the background check process due to discrepancies.
Employment checks involve contacting a candidate’s former employers. If an employer does not respond to a request in a timely fashion, the check might take longer than anticipated. Other verifications (such as educational history or references) may be delayed for the same reasons.
I try to overcome these challenges with quick and consistent follow-ups.
You must have come across many unique instances of fraud. Can you share a couple of anecdotes?
Yes. Frauds happen quite often.
Educational frauds:
- There was a time when I faced the issue of forged documents submission. A few candidates had never attended the class. But managed to arrange fake documents. After further investigation, University officials confirmed that the documents were fake.
- Some universities are not allowed to offer distance learning courses as per the guidelines issued by the governing bodies. However, some universities are issuing distance learning certificates, which result in discrepancies.
- There are also a few cases where it was found that the candidate had attended the classes but failed to clear the final semester and forged documents for that particular semester.
- Sometimes, the candidate had attended the classes and cleared all the exams as well, but still forged the Final grade / CGPA just to get placement in better companies.
Address frauds:
- The candidate had shifted from the address but still used the same address for all sorts of communication purposes. However, when the candidate is not residing at the address and tries to complete the verification from a different location, it can be identified through our proprietary GPS-based address verification application.
Walk us through a day in the life of Sefali!
- Get up with morning tea at 9 am.
- Login at 10 am.
- Have Team meetings at 9.40 am.
- Have Breakfast at 10.30 am.
- Check my to-dos and Backlogs from the day before.
- Have lunch at 1.45 pm
- Watch Youtube videos/ web series during breaks.
- Get done with the work till 8 pm.
- Dinner.
- Spend some time with family.
- Head to sleep.
What is the Springworks team like?
The best thing is that we work together as a team at Springworks. The company provides flexibility, good management, amazing culture, a supportive environment, and great mentors to its employees.
What advice would you give to other Operations Ninja working under Background verification processes?
Make sure to reduce manual intervention.
Background screening that is done through the manual verification process usually results in loopholes and unauthentic information due to manual intervention
There is a probability that an applicant intentionally provided wrong personally-identifying information that misleads the background check.
Inducting automation in the background screening process literally eliminates these concerns and prevents businesses from hiring people who would otherwise fail their background checks.
