Ben Stein How Not to Ruin Your Life

Want to Survive the Recession? Work It Out

by Ben Stein

Posted on Friday, April 11, 2008, 12:00AM

Now for a few words that may give you some guidance on life as it is.

Last week, my pal Mike Long and I had dinner at a Thai place in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Then we walked one long, steep block to Barnes & Noble so I could buy a few photo books of D.C. to send to my friends in California.

The store was almost empty, possibly because of a powerful rain that was falling. I found several lovely books and brought them to the sales counter, where two young salesclerks, a man and a woman, were lounging. I told them I wanted to buy the books and have them mailed or otherwise sent to three addresses in California.

Deer, Meet Headlights

The young clerks looked worried. “We don’t know how to do that,” one of them said.

“You don’t ever send books?” I asked.

“Hey, we’re students at George Washington University,” the young woman said. “We don’t know how to do much.”

“But surely other customers have wanted to send books,” I said.

They shrugged.

“Can you call over a manager?” I asked.

“Yes,” the young woman said eagerly. “Yes.” Soon, a pretty young woman with short hair appeared.

To make a long story short, she was indeed the manager, but she didn’t know how to send the books, either. In fact, even after I’d carefully spelled out all of the addresses, they couldn’t figure out how to send anything.

For the entire article go to yahoo.com

This is a great article and oh so true. Corra Background Checks has long believed that your employees can make or break a business. People respond to good service and to workers who seem to know what they are doing.

To be sure you are hiring the proper employee to fill the position, Corra preemployment screening service offers a full array of pre-employment background check packages. Our pre-employment screening packages are sufficient unto themselves or can be customized to fit your particular needs.

Remember, with your employees being your business’ best foot forward, don’t make it a misstep.

Check them out before you hire.

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From time to time Corra conducts education verifications and finds the employment candidate is a proud graduate from a school that doesn’t exist. It may exist on paper, his paper, or more specifically, his diploma. But nowhere else does that school exist.

There is no campus. There are no teachers. There are no football, basketball or even field hockey teams. There isn’t even a phone number for the administration office. The only scant proof reference to this university is an office somewhere cranking out degrees and selling them over the Internet, or via email.

These are the diploma mills. Wikipedia offers a pretty apt description of diploma mills. Basically, they are bogus in every way, except the provide a certification of graduation in exchange for some bucks. These school are not accredited; they offer no courses. They don’t exist. Except to take the money of the unsuspecting who want to pretend they have a degree.

For a certain amount you can get a Bachelor’s Degree, for a few bucks more, a Masters, and for a few bucks more, you can own your very own PHD. For what is termed in the industry as “life experience.”

Corra conducts education verification and international education verification to make sure your employment candidate actually went to the school he has listed on his resume. If it is a phony school that is part of the diploma mill circuit, Corra will let you know.

Check them out before you hire.

Audit finds Texas agencies have room to improve on background checks

Don’t assume that everyone hired or licensed by a Texas agency has a squeaky clean record. Not all state agencies check the background of those they hire or license.

And dozens of other agencies need to improve their background check procedures, Texas State Auditor John Keel said in a report released last week.

Auditors surveyed 157 state agencies and higher education institutions about their procedures for checking the backgrounds of employees, licensees, contractors and, in some cases, students.

The study, commissioned by the Legislature, found that criminal background procedures are inconsistent and that some agencies authorized or required to perform them don’t.

For the entire article go to dallasnews.com

Corra must admit we are not shocked by this article. Really, with most states, you have human resource people relying on themselves or their staff for background checks. Quite often something can get lost in the interpretation.

Of course, this is if they conduct a background check in the first place. Some states do not, as some businesses fail to vet their employment candidates. Some will conduct partial background checks, figuring that’s enough. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.

Each fact of a background check can reveal parts of a personality, behavior traits. The strength of a good pre-employment screening service is in its ability to interpret these reports. Surely, it is important for a background checking service to offer the complete array of background research. And while some of the information is pretty cut and dry, some of the reports are subject to interpretation. A good screener can pick up on behavioral patterns and personality traits that may affect the employee and the work place.

Check them out before you hire.

Job seekers: Get used to full disclosure

Nervous employers are digging deeper into your past, and it’s better to confess the facts than be fingered.

By Molly Selvin
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Fibbing on your resume is a really bad idea.

First, you will probably be found out by the army of commercial background screeners that employers deploy to scour resumes, check criminal records and pull credit histories.

Plus, you don’t need to. Most bosses are pretty forgiving if you come clean about a minor brush with the law or a supervisor so nutty he sent you running for the door.

Yet resume tinkering is practically an epidemic. Superheated competition for jobs, especially those with big paychecks, tempts many to pump air into their resumes. A gig as an administrative assistant expands into a management title. A mail-order MBA is passed off as the real deal.

“We tend to disproportionately reward individuals with extraordinary records,” observed Kirk Hanson, a business professor and executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “There’s a huge incentive that’s increased over the years in claiming that you’re a star, so individuals tend to knock pieces from their resume that are inconsistent with being a star and add things that are consistent with that image.”

But the precipitous tumble of high-profile managers in recent years should send up red flags for every job-seeker.

For the entire article go to LATimes.com

Corra believes this is a really good article, one that prospective job candidates should heed carefully. There are so many ways to get caught in a lie, chances are the people running your background check will have thought of at least three possibilities for the reasons you are being evasive.

The background check is increasingly a proven tool for the human resource manager. And most HR Managers are aware that when candidates lies do lie they will lie mostly about their criminal records and education.

Corra is one of the background checking services that will run education and employment verification both domestically and on an international basis. With most employers willing to overlook certain mishaps or a lack of education, few will overlook your lying. So fess up. It’s smarter.

Check them out before you hire.