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Why Remote Writers Get Jobs Without a Degree

Over 60 percent of HR professionals are very unprofessional, in that they don’t think you need to run a background check. When was the last time you landed a freelance writing job and they verified your academic background?

HR Recruiters, here's a question for you:

"Why make a university degree a job requirement if you don't even verify the facts?"

Well, take a look at some data to set you straight.

Here are three of the most common issues you're overlooking as a recruiter, courtesy of Fast Company:

1. Inflated roles According to an OfficeTeam report, 76% of candidates embellished job experience, and 55% exaggerated their job duties.

In an effort to get to where they want to go career-wise, job-seekers will put down the titles of jobs they believed they deserved as opposed to their actual work roles.

What to look for: Vague descriptions of skills that aren’t consistent with what your job posting actually demands.

2. Suspicious dates Job-seekers know gaps in employment tend to raise red flags for recruiters and HR pros. As a result, they tend to get creative in covering up those gaps. Example: Date blocks that only include the year, instead of the starting/ending month.

3. Lack of degree specificity Education is a huge area for misrepresentation. While there are a few brazen folks who have the guts to put down big-name schools they never even attended, that type of lie generally isn’t what you have to worry about.

A far more common fib comes from candidates that put down degrees they never earned or fell just short of earning.

What to look for: Incomplete degree names. For example, someone may put bachelor’s degree instead of Bachelor of Science (BS) or bachelor of fine arts (BFA).

To be safe, you’ll want to make sure all degree specs were met and the remote writing candidate isn’t among the individuals who lie about something they never actually completed.

All of this goes to underscore the overwhelming need for background checks. With potential freelance applicants lying without restraint and HR employees not doing their job, there is no real way to establish a reliable hiring mechanism without including professional background screening as a part of it. And this needs to be done by a reliable company, one that can verify its results to make sure that they are accurate.

This means that online background checks don’t cut it. Period.