All the US companies I've worked for made sure I was legit before I could log into anything, so I assume background checks to be ubiquitous there, save for the cheapest companies. European employers on the other hand...
Why do you need to do a hard credit check before you give me an offer? Why do you need to know exactly how much I owe on my credit cards, car, house, how much I'm paying per month, and how much I've made at every job for the past 7 years?
That feels... excessive. And weird. And kind of unfair. Now you know my paycheck, and the paycheck before that, and how desperate I am. Well, there goes negotiations.
To be honest, getting insight and access to a major company's networks and maybe customer data is perhaps the same kind of risk to the company as it is for the government to give someone access to (top) secret files. It might not be so much a negotiating tactic as awareness that more sophisticated spies and criminals than the ones in the OP article are targeting your company.
I think that's partly the point.
Many European employers
- don't or rarely offer remote jobs, so they often don't have this problem.
- even if they do some video or phone interview for pre-screening, they nearly always expect the prospective employee to come to a live interview if they are not weeded out by this pre-screening. It is thus expected that you at least live in a country from where you can easily travel to the place where the employer is located.
- often expect their employees to be able to speak the national language, or at least learn it fast. This also makes times hard for North Korean fake IT workers.
> I did not speak the language
As I implied: if you are really talented, you don't have to speak the native language yet, but it is expected that you learn it fast.
The country is small and hires both immigrants, and people who specifically relocate to start working at the English-only companies, as well as local candidates.
Learning Finnish will obviously make your life easier, in many many ways, but companies themselves do not seem to expect or require it.
I worked for years in an English-language work environment in Denmark (I am not Danish), and learned maybe a handful of phrases of spoken Danish the entire time. I was expected to be able to read the occasional email in Danish, but 1) written Danish is not hard in comparison, and 2) even years ago Google Translate was good enough.
It would have been nice from a social perspective to have known more spoken Danish, but my employer didn’t really care, and it isn’t easy to learn if you don’t have strong local connections. Danes will just immediately switch to English by default, and even if you ask them to continue in Danish, you need a decent level of Danish pronunciation to make yourself understood, which is not trivial to get to.
There are a million reasons why this is a bad idea, but I’m sure they don’t have trouble finding people excited to collect free paychecks.
Great interview, good questions, really solid candidate.
His first day on the job, his English went to shit.
Then he refused to pick up the phone or call me back. Lame excuses about how it’s loud there, then he lost his voice, then scheduled a call with the real “Jeff” the American who couldn’t answer anything about what we had discussed an hour earlier.
Reported to Upwork but I sort of doubt they did much about it.
It was day1 on Slack that the issue was immediately apparent.
There are also different levels of background checks. For instance, previous employment verification can be time consuming so some companies skip it. Checking references aren't useful because they can be faked (you have to run background checks with employment verification on the references to make sure they are who they say they are).
The fact that "fake people" can be employed for high level IT companies in the US is just unfathomable to me.
You also have people who outsource themselves. That’s one of the ways that the people who work multiple jobs pull it off.
that's not a scam - that's the new work smarter, not harder method of earning money.