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With the frenzy of hiring happening in BPO companies, recruitment processes are getting short-circuited. Candidates are issued the offer letters without reference checks, so there is no check prior to the entry stage. Once they join, many BPO companies carry out background checks. Even if the check is done well, the fact that it often takes two weeks to two months for its results to come in, defeats its basic purpose. By this time, new employees are often allocated to live customer projects. It’s very tough for the company’s HR department and the line manager to take stern action against the employee since he or she is already working on a live project and cannot be removed from their post so easily.

Often, the background check is conducted quite poorly and can lead to “false positives”, that is, a genuine candidate is assessed as a fake, which is unfair to the genuine candidate.

To prevent this, a first level of background check should be carried out even before a candidate actually joins the company. This should assess things like whether the person studied at the university he or she claims to have studied in; and whether he or she worked in the stated companies as a part of their past work experience. Only when a candidate passes this first level of background check should the company go ahead with the next level, where the claimed marks are verified; the character and behavior in previous jobs are found out.

With this approach, basic background verification can happen quickly and before the employee actually joins the company.

Employees of BPO companies observe odd hours. Most of them work the “US day shift”, which is the night shift in India. They are ferried about between their homes and offices in cars provided by outsourced taxi companies. This surely poses a security risk, especially to female employees. After a couple of untoward incidents involving women BPO employees, most BPO companies insist on providing “affirmative action” benefits to their women employees. One of the measures adopted is to insist that some male employee accompany the female employee. Another is that, in case there is a female employee and a male employee in the same car, the female employee is dropped home first, even if it means there is a detour for the male employee.

Despite the inconvenience caused to the male employee, we believe such affirmative action for female employees is fair, and should be encouraged.  

There are known cases of BPO frauds where employees of BPO companies have coaxed the Personal Identification Number (PIN) of the callers’ Internet Banking accounts, and then, using the PIN numbers, these unscrupulous characters transfer money from their callers’ accounts to their own accounts.

This is plain and simple stealing and deserves the harshest of punishments.

At the same time, we also urge callers to NEVER reveal their PIN numbers to the call center agents.

Hi, Welcome to BPOAds.com. I’m the Webmaster of this website.

The purpose of this blog is to discuss various issues specific to the BPO industry such as poor background checks, fake candidates, customers giving away PIN numbers to call center agents, and so on. We will discuss only professional issues — these can be from the perspective of the company, the employees or its service providers. No personal issues will be discussed.

Visitors are encouraged to participate by posting their comments.

A few sample issues we have discussed include the following:

1. Poor background check unfair to genuine candidates >>>

2. “Affirmative action” in transport of female employees is fair >>>

3. Callers: Please never handover your PIN numbers >>>