Clamour for degrees pushes many to fake CVs

Clamour for degrees pushes many to fake CVs

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Updated 6 hrs 32 mins ago

By DANN OKOTH
Should Members of Parliament be holders of university degrees or not? This has sparked a heated debate, with Kenyans offering different opinions on the matter.

What may not know, however, is that while a sizeable number of our honorable members are not graduates, many Kenyans are holders of the revered piece of document, albeit a falsified one.

The country is now awash with fake degrees, but that is not even the problem. The problem is that millions have been able to cheat their way into plum job placements using these fake degrees – compromising service delivery, and denying genuinely qualified Kenyans an opportunity to serve the county.

Chief executive
Getting these papers is not difficult, especially in Nairobi. All you need is to arm yourself with a few tens of thousands of shillings and a casual stroll to the city’s backstreets and within minutes you will be a proud holder of a degree from any university on the planet.

Possessing fake papers alone is not enough, it emerged. You also need to be a good Curriculum Vitae (CV) writer to take in employers. Can’t produce one? You needn’t worry – professional CV writers are on the prowl. They also come cheap.

For the price of Sh5,000, or less, you can get the best articulated CV anyone can present. All you need to do is to remember a few “backgrounds, achievements and experiences” and leave the rest to the “professionals” in the streets of Nairobi.

In what could shake the public, private and NGOs sector to their core, it has emerged the organistaions are teeming with phony workers disguised as qualified individuals – dangling glittering CVs.

Look more closer, however, and the qualifications, work experiences and achievements so deftly outlined in the chief executive or ordinary worker’s CV are a figment of the imagination of a con artist. “The problem is now so widespread it could bring an entire economy to its knees,” says Major (rtd) Anderson T Amiri, general manager of CV Validators Limited, a subsidiary of Manpower Group.

Set record
“The most affected sectors include the public sector – fueled by nepotism, tribalism and inefficiency they rarely properly vet job applicants. This is extended to the Government parastatals and NGOs which do not bother to dig deep into the backgrounds of their recruits, either because of certain preferences or mere lack of capacity,” he says.

That is why the company formed two years ago has now embarked on a mission to help employers vet their employees with a view of verifying their qualifications.

“So far we have received overwhelming interest from employers who have expressed interest in verifying the actual qualifications of their staff,” he says.

He adds: “This is not intended to sack people or even victimise employees but rather to set the record straight, and even the employers understand this. You would be shocked to discover some of these questionable employees are also the best performing, so the idea is not to phase them out as such, but companies can go further and even institute in-service training – in any event it would be difficult to sack an employee on the basis of this alone in some organisations.”

99 employees
But already, the initiative is sending shockwaves across the labour sector with seven major companies having been put on the radar with 10 other middle to smaller level organisations being lined up.

CV Validators, which was incorporated in 2010 and only started work early this year, exposed a major scandal in a leading corporate organisation leading to 99 employees resigning voluntarily before they were named and shamed.

“At least 99 out of the nearly 5,000 employees did not report back to work when they were told to bring along their certificates,” Amiri reveals. “It was quite shocking because no one expected this. Moreover, many were senior people in the organisation who had served for years,” he adds.

He notes that the common cases they encounter include people who use fake documents or stolen documents. Others are those who lie about their work experience, age, community or even nationality.

But how exactly do they tell the fakes from the genuine?

According Daniel Barmao, the Company’s operations manager, it is easy to tell a fake from a real CV. “There are certain inconsistencies that catch the eye,” he explains.

“In many instances that we have caught cheats involved simply by looking at the small print of the document. Sometimes a different font of one letter in the name is enough to ring the alarm bells. Such mistakes only happen with fraudsters,” he adds.

Other people lie about having lost their documents in a fire, robbery or simply say they have not been mailed, he says, adding that the majority of fake documents like degrees emanate from India.

“Other times you begin to wonder when people you know personally went to school because suddenly they show up with a Masters degree. It happened once when the documents of someone we knew personally including his education background was brought to us for verification and recommendation.

We were shocked he now had a Masters degree and yet he had not gone back to school. Such cases are rather straightforward really because you just need to check with the university immediately,” he says.

He however says they are encountering problems in organisations where the Human Resource (HR) department is also culpable and also universities and other organisations that either take long to respond or simply refuse to cooperate.

“We have met resistance in some organisations whose HR departments themselves are not entirely clean. On the other hand, some colleges and universities take long to respond to our enquiries or are reluctant to cooperate.

This could be because they do not fully understand what we are trying to do. The report is usually presented in confidence to the client because we are not out to ruin people’s reputations,” he says.

But the revelations leave a bitter taste in job seekers’ mouths who feel they are being locked out unfairly by these fraudsters.

Festus Wafula, a graduate, says employers should be more vigilant while recruiting.

Jobless graduate
“This is all the more important while recruiting for the CEOs who earn mega monies after falsifying CVs and documents. The Government cannot regulate everything so it is upon the companies to self-regulate,” says the accounts graduate who has been searching for a job for ten years now.