By Christos Makridis
Costly background checks — the bane of employers — may soon be a thing of the past.
ZippedScript just announced that its pilot program on LinkedIn, which pings the backend computer systems of colleges and universities to verify degrees, is producing positive results.
So far, 5,500 LinkedIn users have taken the firm up on its offer to add a verification badge on their profiles in exchange for having their credentials instantly verified with ZippedScript’s solution. That means that it is cheaper and faster to hire these candidates.
ZippedScript’s tech aims to replace the costly and time-consuming process of having verification firms check with colleges, universities, and training outfits to verify a potential employee’s credentials. Background check firms usually charge more than $40 per job candidate and take an “analog” approach to education verification, phoning campus administrators. That can take days or weeks.
This new tech threatens to disrupt a cozy, high-margin, old-school business.
ZippedScript, an educational technology company that specializes in degree and employment verification, says it can verify credentials in 30 seconds and has verified more than 14,942 claims, for $4.99 per verification.
Chris Harper, CEO of ZippedScript, in 2022.
With employers desperate to fill more than 10 million job positions open nationwide, companies run the risk of hiring unqualified candidates with phony degrees from “diploma mills.” That risks both the company’s reputation and its revenue.
Prevalence and cost of falsifying credentials
Estimating the number of fake diplomas is not easy, but research from Allen Ezell and John Bear over a decade ago suggests that over half of the individuals claiming to have earned a doctorate degree may actually have a fake degree.
The pervasiveness of diploma mills necessitates that employers have some way of verifying candidates’ degree information. That process is time-intensive and costly. Nearly 60% of hiring managers reported fabrications on job applicants’ resumes, according to a 2016 survey by CareerBuilder.com. These estimates could be even higher – 78% of job seekers lie during the interview process, according to a 2020 survey by Checkster. Besides the time involved in verifying educational records, the direct cost on employers is in the tens of millions of dollars.
Those who embellish or lie about their credentials, cite many justifications. They feel that they can do the job even though they don’t really have “the paper.” They started the degree but never finished their course of study.
When it comes to lying about credentials, the dominant reason may be economic: The National Association of Colleges and Employers conducts an annual survey to track the value of earning a Master’s degree versus a Bachelor’s and shows that the salary differences can be significant. Certain Master’s degrees in business or science can nearly double a starting salary, fueling a motive to deceive.
While a majority of people say lying is wrong, most admit that they have lied during social interactions – whether to fit in with a group or due to heightened stress. “Lying comprised 7% of total communication,” according to a survey of 632 participants by Korea University and University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in a recently published paper “and almost 90% of all lies were little white lies.”
Psychologists have also found that individuals comfortable with lying tend to score higher in emotional intelligence–a key component for performing well in job interviews. That is doubly bad for employers: So the people who seem best in job interviews may be the most likely to have lied on their resumes.
The need for speed too often trumps careful screening. “Unfortunately, because the process takes more time than employers are willing to wait to secure a talented candidate, they will bypass these checks and expose their company to the risk of hiring unqualified workers,” said Eric Ly, chief executive officer of KarmaCheck.
Verifying credentials
ZippedScript’s technology allows employers to verify a candidate’s education in less than thirty seconds by connecting directly to an accredited institution’s database. Their technology uses API-integration methods that tend to preserve a candidate’s privacy because user data is not stored. That also reduces the liability for all parties involved since any organizational data breach will not result in employee information being made available online.
“All job seekers are looking for advantages and ways to make themselves more attractive to employers, and this is obviously a way to do that and stand out in a climate where digital uncertainty reigns… another reason this pilot is so compelling has to do with speed : currently, employers wait weeks for this data in many cases, but ZippedScript is changing the landscape since candidates will come into a company pipeline with their educational verification already done,” said Taylor Martin, director of operations at Certn, a screening platform.
The blockchain also provides a way of instantly verifying credentials, but has the upside of empowering users with ownership over their data and having interoperability across different types of blockchains.
Other tech firms are crowding into the credential verification space. The Learning Economy recently launched LearnCard, a digital wallet for education and employment programmable verifiable credentials.
The Learn Card digital wallets.
“We have expanded the ‘triangle of trust’ – initially introduced by MasterCard and Visa in the context of credit cards – to include education and employment, allowing many different issuers to exchange credentials on behalf of many different individuals, in real time and with trust … this paves the way for verifiable credentials to replace paper based credentials and disrupt every corner of education and employment. Verifiable credentials offer a seamless approach to verifying skills, credentials and job history,” said Chris Purifoy, chairman of the Learning Economy.
With the increasing prevalence and normalization of digital wallets for learners and employees, the next critical feature will be the ability to connect to employment databases for real-time verification of self-made claims.
Soon, every element of a job candidate’s resume could be instantly and digitally checked — improving both the quality and speed of new hires. That’s good news for an economy reeling from inflation, strikes, and supply-chain disruptions.
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