Easy & Fast Background Verification to Decrease Fake Degrees

Education in India is huge. One cannot escape the emphasis on it, rightfully so, even if we wanted to. Just type in ‘education’ in your Google search query for news, and the snippets of news you see clearly show the emphasis. The effort to further the cause of education is apparent and much needed.

But, there is a side to it, which is alarming and worrying — the problem of fake degrees.

Recently, in an attempt to bring light to increasing fake doctoral degrees issued to Indians, Students’ Federation of India (SFI) has written a letter to Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD) urging to take precautionary measures.

“Genuine researchers earn a doctoral degree after years of committed work in their respective field. Lack of stringent actions… is in another way questioning and nullifying the genuine effort of scholars who work hard for a better part of their life,” read the letter from SFI.

The problem of fake degrees is not new, especially in India. It has been prevalent in all forms and has risen to astronomic levels in recent times. The counterfeit certificates range from fake universities issuing degrees, diploma mills, and forged degrees of existing reputed universities.

Leaving the moral and social impact aside; there are substantial economic implications to this practice as well. In a paper titled ‘The Economics of Fake Degrees,’ Gilles Grolleau points out the long term effects falsified degrees could have on an organization and the economy of a country.

An organization can lose $17,000 on average, says CareerBuilder, for a wrong hire or for hiring someone with a false degree. The recruiting team doesn’t have any tool which could help them in mitigating it. Read more on this in our blog here.

And then, there are career endorsements

While counterfeit degrees have a considerable negative impact, the social attestation of an individual’s skills is a whole other beast to tackle in itself. The rise of social channels for career profiles like LinkedIn, Indeed, Naukri, etc. have raised a whole new challenge for the recruiting world.

Anyone can post any amount of career skills they want to, irrespective of their proficiency, regarding any subject, on these career websites. Moreover, these skills could be endorsed by anyone in their professional network without proper checks and balances. You could add or remove any skill you want without a degree of thought, and it would be added to your profile.

These are the same websites and profiles which are used by most organizations to find their next team member. The algorithms running in the background of these platforms use skills listed by the individual to match potential open job roles posted by recruiters.

The unattested facts on the professional profiles online is a way of falsifying a career path, much like faking a degree.

And thus, the need for true authentication

Validating the degrees and skills before hiring anyone is the key to solving the problem in the long run. Once every organization makes it a point that verifying credentials is a part of their hiring process, people will make sure they get an authentic degree.

The problem is that it is not easy to get the verification done. Authenticating anyone in India takes a long time, a lot of resources and quite a bit of money. And, the reason it is not as prevalent as we need it to be. It will take time before we get to a place where we altogether remove falsified degrees. We will need help from the authorities, the government, the lawmakers, and the law enforcers.

We, at SpringRole, are building the platform for the future where everyone has a profile which is verified and authenticated. Any skills uploaded by anyone get attested by people who have a specific proficiency at the particular skill and have worked together.

The profiles are written onto a blockchain for future. Using blockchain, we can make sure the profiles, once verified, can have an immutable online presence for future references.

SpringVerify is our super-fast and super-easy background verification platform. Any organization can use it to get their current and future team verified.

Together with an easy verification platform and immutable profiles on the blockchain with a process for accurate authentication of skills, should solve some of the problems faced by false degrees in the industry right now.

About SpringRole

SpringRole is enabling everyone’s #VerifiedProfessionalProfile on the Blockchain. It is a decentralized attestation-based professional network platform powered by the blockchain.

SpringRole is the platform where people can view, share, and get attestations on their professional profile, thereby creating a verified resume that they can share and use. The organizations themselves verify a user’s educational qualifications and work experience, which is written directly to the blockchain. To assess a user’s skill set, SpringRole has a system of weighted endorsements that let users objectively look at people’s profiles and evaluate their skill level.

Learn More

To learn more, and be up-to-date about all-things-SpringRole:

About SpringVerify

SpringVerify is the modern take on the age-old problem of employee verification being costly, tedious, and out of reach of small businesses. We are trying to build a platform where the employee verification process happens seamlessly and with minimal effort required from both the company and the employee.

We believe that employee verification is a must for any business. It is a critical process in ensuring that every employee working with you is faithful and could be trusted. CareerBuilder survey shows that a company stands to lose on average $17000 on a wrong hire. Read more here.

We have built the platform with blockchain and believe that it will change virtually everything it comes in contact with. Blockchain helps us in building a decentralized system which keeps all our data secure and immutable. Read more here.