ess than a year before Kafeel Ahmed rammed his gasoline-laden Jeep Cherokee
into a terminal at Glasgow International Airport, he was an aeronautics engineer
at Infotech Enterprises in Bangalore, a company whose workforce helps to build planes
for Boeing and Airbus.
Ahmed is not suspected of doing anything untoward during his
time at Infotech, but the incident in Scotland on June 30 is an example of why Indian
companies are increasingly performing background checks on their employees.
"In India, this process is just maturing," says David Raj
Jesumarian, director of human resources at the Hyderabad office of IT consulting
firm Virtusa, which performs about 1,000 background checks a year for its prospective
new hires. "It’s a shock to the recruits, but we’re upfront with them at the first
interview that offers are valid based on a background check."
Virtusa, based near Boston, has outsourced its background
checks to First Advantage, a St. Petersburg, Florida, company that verifies a candidate’s
education, work experience, personal background and criminal history. Candidates
must also undergo a drug test.
Security is a huge concern in India and is taken seriously
by both client and vendor, since Indian companies win contracts that give them access
to a client’s proprietary information. Clients often perform random security audits
on their Indian vendors, says Sivaramakrishnan Kalyanaraman, global head of human
resources for Intelligroup, a technology services company whose clients include
General Electric. The company has dedicated a floor to housing GE data inside its
office in Hyderabad.
"Clients want to make sure we are following a strict process
for [checking] backgrounds," Kalyanaraman says.
Every company that has U.S. clients has some degree of security
personnel standing guard outside its offices, many of which are housed inside gated
office parks. The largest companies have the most stringent measures.
At Wipro Technologies’ Bangalore headquarters, laptop serial
numbers are recorded to make sure the same computer that is brought into the building
is taken out. Employees wear passes that say whether they have clearance to bring
laptops to work. At UBS, the Swiss financial firm, cameras cannot be taken inside
the company’s newly constructed glass and granite building. Such global security
standards have been exported to nearly every Indian company or offshore office of
a multinational.
"We follow international standards and practices of security
now," says Jagrant Pandher, a former lieutenant colonel in the Indian army and a
senior manager for security at Verizon’s office in Hyderabad.
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