Businesses Verifying Educational Backgrounds Too

This newspaper confirmed on August 26 that Choongwae Pharma Corporation (CWP), a domestic pharmaceutical company, has decided to verify the educational backgrounds of all its employees.

It is the first time that a company has decided to check its workers’ educational backgrounds since fabricated diplomas and degrees of well-renowned people in the cultural industry and celebrities became a social issue.

The business circle expects that similar moves will spread across industries beginning in the recruit season between July and December.

An official from the CWP said on the same day, “We concluded that we would verify the educational background of all our 1,300 workers some time soon because false educational backgrounds can never be tolerated in this company where sincerity is given the top priority.”

He added, “We have already checked whether they actually got the degrees on their documents in 2002. However, we decided to do this again amid the recent incident revolving around fabricated educational backgrounds. Employees found to have submitted false records will be committed to human resources committee”

The authentication process will include those with higher educational backgrounds like masters or doctoral degrees in the research and development (R&D) field. It will also check whether universities are certified for those with overseas college degrees, or whether they actually earned the degrees.

The decision is likely to affect other companies because it is an open secret that not a few jot applicants lie in their resumes. In a survey of 315 companies’ human resources managers conducted by Career, a job information provider, in February this year, 85.1 percent of them answered yes to the question if they have found applicants who lied about their backgrounds.

In the same survey of 2,010 job applicants, 8.6 percent noted that they once fabricated school credits, language scores and other backgrounds.

Major groups like Samsung and LG said that it is up to an affiliate’s decision that it will verify workers’ educational backgrounds. They responded reluctantly, “We have yet to have a special plan to tackle this.”

However, according to Nterway, a headhunter company, domestic companies started to take similar measures. Many companies reportedly requested the service that had been launched earlier this month to verify degrees from overseas universities and colleges.

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