Legal and Effective Reference Checking & Credential and Education Verification
With hiring decisions becoming more critical in challenging economic times, verifying past employment, credentials and education, and obtaining references has become critical. Unfortunately, falsifying or inflating employment and educational accomplishments has become a significant problem for employers. Legal limitations also create barriers for human resource professional when obtaining and giving past employment information. This workshop reviews legal and effective technique for the reference-checking process and how to verify education and spot phony credentials and worthless degree mills. New technologies and approaches will also be reviewed, as well as special issues involving international credentials and the role of social media sites and Web 2.0 in the process.
Learning Objectives:
- Learn effective and legal strategies to verify an applicant's past employment and education accomplishments.
- Explore why employment references create legal issues for employers and strategies for obtaining information and dealing with requests from other employers.
- Learn why phony education credentials are problematic and how to spot degree mills.
- Review new technologies and approaches to credentials verifications.
- Understand special issues when it comes to social media sites and international employment and education verification.
Lester S. Rosen

Lester S. Rosen is an attorney at law and CEO of Employment Screening Resources (ESR), a national background screening company. He is a consultant, writer, expert witness and frequent presenter nationwide on pre-employment screening. He is the author of “The Safe Hiring Manual,” (3d Edition 2017/826 pages), the first comprehensive book on background screening. He served as the chairperson of the steering committee that founded the Professional Background Screeners Association (PBSA), served as its first co-chair and received the PBSA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.
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