China Hiring. Background Checks Required.

Just read a post on the China Leadership Blog, entitled, Why China Hiring Background Checks: We now have 15 reasons. The post was on the writer’s hiring agency had narrowed down job candidates to 15 and none of the 15 passed the background check:

We were placing a GM for a Western family owned factory. They are small and troubled.  We found 15 thoroughly qualified candidates for the position. We had candidates tell us they worked at a company 5 years when they only worked 1. We had candidates tell us they were super valuable,  and the company does not want to let them go. We were able to find out that they were fired a year before  while still in probation.

As the last of the group of 15 refused to come clean and give us an accurate resume, we shook our heads in dismay. We are excellent at interviews and interview 90 minutes as our goal is to know. Despite that, we were unable to uncover these issues before the background check.

We had one guy tell us he was the overall manager for a big project, and he could describe in great detail all he had done. Our China hiring background check uncovered that he was a common worker under a manager who led that project.

I suspect many are surprised by the above, but I can tell you that if I told this to the China lawyers at my firm, not a single one of them would be surprised. In fact, their reaction would be along the lines, of “so.” We see this sort of thing ALL the time, with employees of our clients and with the Chinese companies with which they do business. Just the other day, an American company called to see about getting out of a long-term exclusive product distribution agreement it had signed with a Chinese company that claimed experience with selling a particular product, but had actually been in an entirely different business.

Bottom Line: Trust but verify. Conduct your due diligence.