How to read a discrepancy without over-reacting to it

What a discrepancy actually is

A discrepancy is the gap between two statements: what the candidate told you, and what the record holder told us. That is all it is. It carries no built-in judgement about why the gap exists, and the reasons are more varied than most people expect.

Consider one candidate who declares employment from March 2021 to June 2023, and a former employer who confirms April 2021 to June 2023. That is a discrepancy. It is also almost certainly the difference between an offer date and a payroll start date, or a probation confirmation, or the candidate remembering wrongly three years later. It is not evidence of anything.

Now consider a candidate who declares two years at a company that says it has no record of them at any time. That is also a discrepancy, and it is a completely different kind of thing. The system that reports both as amber is not being unhelpful; it is being neutral, which is what a verification report should be. The reading is yours.

Detail against substance

The single most useful cut to make is between findings that dispute a detail of a claim and findings that dispute the claim itself.

The left column is what you would expect from a person filling in a form about their own life from memory. The right column is what you would expect if a claim were not true. Most of what a report flags sits on the left.

"Unable to verify" is a third thing

This is the status most often misread, and the misreading is expensive. Unable to verify does not mean the source contradicted the candidate. It means the source did not answer.

Common causes, none of which are about the candidate:

• The former employer has shut down, and there is no successor holding the records.
• The employer routes verification through a paid third-party agency and will not respond otherwise.
• The employer simply does not answer verification requests, which some do not.
• The university records office does not respond to third parties, or requires a process the candidate has to initiate.
• Records for the relevant period or jurisdiction are not digitised.

Treating this as a soft fail penalises candidates for the administrative behaviour of organisations they left years ago. It also, in practice, penalises people who worked at smaller and less formal employers, which is not a distinction any employer sets out to make.

What a good provider does instead is escalate and document: a second contact route, a written request trail, and where a UAN exists, a cross-read against EPFO records that can independently confirm that contributions were made by that establishment for that period. That last one is often the difference between an unanswerable check and a confirmed one.

A process for handling a flag

Four steps, in order. The order matters more than the detail.

1. Read the annexure, not the status

Go to the evidence behind the finding. What exactly did the source say? A finding described as "employment discrepancy" can be anything from a two-week date difference to a denial of employment, and the status chip does not distinguish them.

2. Classify it as detail or substance

Use the table above. If it is detail, most of the time the correct response is to note it and move on. If it is substance, it needs a decision.

3. Ask the candidate

Tell them what was found and give them a real opportunity to respond. Not a formality, and not after you have decided. Many flags resolve here, because the candidate holds a document, or knows that the HR desk you contacted covers a different entity, or can explain a gap in one line.

4. Decide against the role, and write down why

The same finding does not mean the same thing for every role. An undisclosed six-month gap matters differently for a graduate trainee and for a finance controller. Whatever you decide, record the reasoning. It takes a minute and it is the only thing that makes the decision reviewable later.

Decide the policy before you have the case

The worst time to work out how your organisation handles a flagged finding is while a joining date approaches and a hiring manager is on the phone. The decision gets made under pressure, by whoever is least willing to defend the candidate, and it is inconsistent with the decision the same organisation made two months earlier.

Three things worth settling in advance:

• Who owns an amber finding. One named role, not a committee and not the hiring manager alone.
• What the candidate is told, and when. Write the wording once so it is not improvised each time.
• Which findings are automatically material. A short list, agreed in advance, of the things that stop a hire regardless of role. Keep it genuinely short.

Everything not on that last list is a judgement, and judgements are better made against a written policy than against a deadline.

One note on fairness

Verification exists to remove guesswork, and it can add guesswork back if the output is treated as a score. Nothing in a discrepancy tells you about a person's character. It tells you that two records disagree. The step from "these records disagree" to "this person is dishonest" is one a human makes, and it should be made deliberately, with the evidence in front of them, and with the candidate's answer in hand.

That is the whole reason GVS annexes the evidence to every finding rather than issuing a verdict. Detail is written up further in the anatomy of a discrepancy, which walks each check in turn, and what a candidate can ask for is set out on the candidates page.