Employment History

Employment history is used for two distinct purposes and they have very different reliability.

Verification asks whether the claims are true: did this person work at that organisation, in that role, between those dates. This is answerable, usually accurately, and it is worth doing for reasons that have little to do with predicting performance. A material misstatement is itself relevant information.

Interpretation asks what the history tells you about the candidate: whether they are reliable, ambitious, difficult or committed. This is where processes place most weight and where the evidence is weakest. The same history supports several readings, and the reading chosen usually reflects the reader.

Keeping the two apart is the main discipline. Verify what can be verified, and treat interpretation as a hypothesis to test in conversation rather than as a finding.

The salary row deserves comment. Asking for previous salary anchors the new offer to the old one, which perpetuates whatever gaps existed in the candidate's previous employment and disadvantages people who were underpaid, disproportionately those already earning less. Pricing the role rather than the person avoids importing another employer's decisions.

The bottom row is the useful one. Scope is best established by asking the candidate to describe specifics, which is difficult to fake in detail and reveals more than any title.

Gaps in employment history attract disproportionate suspicion and rarely deserve it.

The common causes are caring responsibilities, illness or recovery, study, relocation, redundancy in a difficult market, visa or relocation timing, parental leave beyond a period covered by an employer, and periods of self-employment or freelance work that the candidate did not think to present as employment.

Screening gaps out, formally or informally, removes a predictable set of people: carers, who are disproportionately women; people who have been ill; people who were made redundant during a downturn; and returners generally. That is both a narrowing of the candidate pool and, where it tracks a protected characteristic, an exposure.

The proportionate approach is to ask, once, without treating the answer as requiring justification. Most explanations are unremarkable, take one sentence and close the question.

What is genuinely worth attention is not a gap but an inconsistency: dates that conflict between documents, a period described differently at different points, or a reluctance to discuss a specific period at all. Those are questions about the account rather than about the absence of employment.

A short stay is read as a warning and often is not one.

A single short tenure carries almost no information. Roles are misdescribed at hiring, organisations restructure, managers change, funding disappears, and a considered decision to leave a role that was not what was promised is a sign of judgement rather than its absence.

A pattern of short tenures is more informative, and still ambiguous. It may indicate difficulty settling, and it may equally indicate a sector where that is normal, a period of contract work, a run of poorly-run employers, or a person who was repeatedly hired into roles that did not exist as described.

The useful step is to ask about the pattern directly and listen to whether the account is coherent. Someone who can explain each move, and whose explanations do not all consist of other people being at fault, has answered the question.

It is also worth noticing what the organisation's own data says. An employer with substantial first-year attrition is in a poor position to treat short tenure as disqualifying, since it is producing that history in other people's candidates.

Verification is a processing activity involving personal data, and doing it thoroughly is not the same as doing it correctly.

• Obtain consent before contacting a current employer, and be specific about who will be contacted and when. Approaching a current employer without consent can cost the candidate their job.
• Verify what is proportionate to the role rather than everything available as a matter of routine.
• Keep the verification result rather than a narrative summary, and record who confirmed what and when.
• Apply the same checks to every candidate for a role, since selective verification is where inconsistent treatment enters.
• Set a retention period for verification records and apply it, rather than accumulating them indefinitely.

The obligations here arise under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and are dealt with in the entries covering it and background checks. Its substantive duties are not yet in force: notification G.S.R. 843(E) of 13 November 2025 brings sections 3 to 17, which carry the grounds for processing, notice, consent, the obligations of a data fiduciary and the data principal rights, into force on 13 May 2027. The definitions, the Data Protection Board and the penalty machinery commenced on 13 November 2025. So the practice described here is how to be ready, and good design in its own right, rather than a duty that binds today. The general shape, being consent, proportionality, accuracy and retention, is worth designing to regardless of the detail.

A practical point that costs nothing: tell candidates what will be verified before doing it. Discrepancies are usually explained rather than concealed, and giving the opportunity to explain first turns a red flag into a resolved question.