How to Verify a Candidate's Work History and Degree

You made the offer. Everyone's relieved. Then three months in, you find out the "five years at a multinational" was actually eight months through a staffing agency, and the degree on the CV is from a university that, as far as you can tell, doesn't run that programme. Now you're managing someone whose whole story you never checked.

This is the gap between a reference check and a background check, and small employers often skip the second one entirely because it feels like something only big companies do. It isn't. It just takes an afternoon, and it's worth doing before someone starts, not after something goes wrong.

Reference checks and background checks are not the same thing

A reference check asks someone's opinion: how did they perform, would you hire them again. A background check confirms facts: did this person actually work there, actually hold that title, actually earn that degree. You need both, but they answer different questions. A glowing reference from a friend who was never actually a manager tells you nothing if the employment itself is invented.

What's worth checking

You don't need to verify everything on a CV. Focus on the claims that would actually change your decision if they were false.

1. Dates and titles at previous employers. Not performance, just the facts: did they work there, from when to when, in what role. Discrepancies of a month or two are common and usually harmless — people round. A whole job that doesn't exist, or a title two levels above what the company confirms, is a different problem.
2. The degree or qualification itself, if the role requires it. For a job that genuinely needs an accounting qualification, an engineering degree, a nursing licence — confirm it exists. For a job where the degree is just a nice-to-have, this is usually not worth the time.
3. Professional licences and certifications, where the role depends on one — a driving licence for a delivery role, a security licence, a professional body membership. These are usually checkable on a public register in minutes.
4. Right to work, if you're hiring across borders or the candidate needs a permit or visa. This one isn't optional and isn't really a judgement call — get it confirmed before an offer becomes binding.

What's usually not worth it for a small company: credit checks, criminal record checks for roles that don't need them, and scrolling someone's social media looking for red flags. The last one in particular tends to introduce more bias than information — you'll form an opinion about someone's politics or personal life that has nothing to do with whether they can do the job, and you can't un-know it.

How to actually verify it

Don't call the number the candidate gave you for their old employer. Look up the company's main line yourself and ask for HR or the people team. Most mid-sized and larger companies have a standard process for this — sometimes it's a form, sometimes it's a quick phone confirmation of dates and title only, no opinions given. Small companies and startups may just have you speak to whoever's around; that's fine, but still call the number you found, not the one you were given.

For degrees, go to the university registrar, not the department. Most universities have a verification service or a form for exactly this — confirming a named individual completed a named programme in a given year. Some charge a small fee. It's normal for this to take a few days, so build that into your offer timeline rather than doing it after someone's already started.

For professional licences, check the regulator's public register directly. Most licensing bodies — medical, legal, engineering, financial — publish a searchable list. This is the fastest check on the list and there's no reason to skip it if the role requires the licence.

Ask the candidate for help if something's hard to trace, especially with older jobs or companies that have since closed or renamed. A reasonable candidate will offer a payslip, a reference letter, or a former colleague's contact. Someone who gets defensive or evasive when asked to help confirm something they wrote themselves is telling you something.

When in the process to do this

After the interview, after you've decided you want to hire them, but before the offer is final — ideally as a condition of the offer, stated plainly: "this offer is subject to verification of employment and qualifications." That sentence, in writing, before they've handed in notice at their current job, does most of the work. It signals you check, which on its own discourages people from stretching the truth, and it gives you a clean way to withdraw an offer if something doesn't hold up, without it turning into a dispute.

What to do when something doesn't match

Most mismatches are small and explainable — a job title that changed six months before someone left, a start date off by a few weeks because of how a company logged it. Ask the candidate directly and give them the chance to explain before you assume the worst. "HR confirmed different dates than what's on your CV — can you help me understand the gap?" is a fair, neutral way to raise it.

What's not a judgement call: a degree that doesn't exist, a job that never happened, a licence that isn't on the register. Those aren't rounding errors. If someone fabricated the foundation of their application, that's information about how they'll operate once they're inside your company, not just about this one hire.

The honest limit here

This kind of checking tells you whether someone's history is real. It tells you nothing about whether they can actually do the job in front of you — that's a different question, best answered with a structured interview and a real work sample rather than another phone call. Some employers use a skills assessment for exactly that reason: it doesn't care what university someone went to, it tests what they can do today. AssessFit caps CV-based scoring at 30% of a candidate's total for this reason — credentials matter, but they're not the whole picture, and verifying them is only step one.