Information for the personnel officer: how to verify the authenticity of a diploma of higher education

When hiring a new employee, it will be useful to check his documents, even if by all criteria this is an ideal candidate. Since the competition in the labor market is quite large, applicants strive to stand out at all costs, and most often - a brilliant certificate of graduation. How to verify the authenticity of a diploma? What to pay attention to? What to do with a fake candidate?

One of the easiest and most effective ways to verify a document is to send a request to the higher education institution that issued it. Unfortunately, universities are not always ready to provide this kind of information and often refuse to request, citing the fact that they cannot disclose confidential information. In this case, there is no other way than to verify the authenticity of the candidate’s diploma by writing an official request to the educational institution. The answer will have to wait about a week, but a reliable result is guaranteed. The only thing that complicates this way of checking the document is that the potential employee must give written consent to it. In addition, the candidate has the right to know why the employer needed such information. Consent on paper, signed by the employee’s hand, is equivalent to an electronic document with a digital electronic signature or other analogs of a handwritten signature, provided for by federal laws and regulations.

How to verify the authenticity of a diploma if a candidate refuses to give his consent? It turns out that this is not possible, since information about the education of a potential employee is personal data, and their disclosure without his permission is illegal. In this case, you can contact the university and ask to confirm that such a diploma of higher education was issued without specifying to whom exactly. To obtain such information, the consent of the employee is not necessary.

It is possible to check whether the university’s diploma provided by the applicant is “fake”, you can also by searching for his fellow students on social networks such as Odnoklassniki or VKontakte. This is not a very reliable option for obtaining reliable information, but still in the absence of others it may come in handy.

In the near future, the authenticity of documents, in particular diplomas of higher education, can be verified in an electronic database, the creation of which is already being worked out by order of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. There are facts that the authenticity of the diplomas of some people who ran for positions in parliament was denied when applying to the university. Therefore, there is hope that such a database will help to reveal many deceptions.

There is another facet of confirming the authenticity of such documents: many fake diplomas were purchased at the institution itself, and therefore they are duly registered. Therefore, additional testing of a candidate for knowledge and aptitude will never hurt.

Summary

There are several ways to verify a college degree. But in any case, even if the authenticity is not confirmed by the university, it is worth taking a closer look at the candidate and making a decision not only on the basis of these data. It often happens that a person without a diploma does a much better job than a “red” graduate. The recommendations of previous employers and checking the security service for the presence of past offenses will help here.