In today’s hiring environment, verifying an applicant’s identity can be the difference between hiring a career employee and dealing with a devastating lawsuit.
Identity verification should be the first step in your background investigation process, but not all employers do their proper due diligence.
Name-only matching procedures do exist in background checks, and they put your business in jeopardy of a detrimental hire. Let’s dive into the issues with name-only matching, and how you can avoid this practice to protect your business.
What is Name-Only Matching?
According to the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) official advisory opinion, “Name-only matching occurs when a consumer reporting agency uses only first and last name to determine whether a particular item of information relates to a particular consumer, without using other personally identifying information such as address, date of birth, or Social Security number.”
They go on to say “the 2010 US census (the most recent to have last name statistics available) found more than 2.4 million respondents with the last name of Smith, 1.9 million respondents with the last name of Johnson, 1.6 million respondents with the last name of Williams, and more than 1 million respondents each with the last name of Brown, Jones, Garcia, Miller, Davis, Rodriguez, Martinez, or Hernandez.”
And that was the 2010 census!
The quick thinkers among us have likely started to imagine how many ways this can go wrong. As an employer, those statistics prove you will most likely offer a position to someone with one of those last names at some point in your businesses' life.
Without understanding the shortfalls of name-only matching, you put yourself at serious risk of making a poor decision and hurting your operations.
How Common is Your Name?