So you’ve graduated and you’ve got job offers lined up. Optimistic in this economy, right?

Okay, so eventually you’ll get a job that you’ll actually need a degree to be qualified for and they’ll check with your school to make sure you passed all of your classes. Or maybe not. Many of the companies I’ve worked with don’t verify educational requirements at all. And this trend has led to a dirty little secret: resume fraud.

Let’s say you went to a college for four years but never finished up the last of your requirements to graduate. Instead of saying you attended but you didn’t graduate, you say you graduate and you bet on the fact that they won’t check at all. Or let’s say you’ve been in the workforce for a while and a position requires a college degree but you don’t have one. So you say you went to State U for four years and graduated and nobody checks.

Even worse, there are companies called diploma mills that generate fake degrees based on “real life experience” or on no experience at all. They’ll have a number people can call to verify on the off chance that they actually do a educational background check at all.

I have very much pushed for companies to check for these things because it is so widespread and you never know what you’re going to get. It is difficult to do it yourself so I recommend a full service background check service like CrimCheck to get results in a reasonable timeframe.

Organizations that have done this have really appreciated the educational backgrounds of the people they hired because everything could be verified (and people knew that before applying so you avoid fraudsters).