More companies use Aadhaar to verify new hires

BENGALURU: Employers are beginning to use Aadhaar to verify their potential employees, a move that could see the weeklong verification process reducing to less than 15 minutes, and hiring costs falling dramatically. It is also helping make the process paperless — no need to provide documents that show, say, the proof of residence. One of the country's largest private sector employers, contract staffing firm Quess, has onboarded more than 30,000 employees — blue collar and white collar — using Aadhaar verification over the past four months. Quess employs 2.1 lakh people, and supplies them to companies that need them.

Attrition rates are very high in certain categories of its employees, so its hiring numbers are always big. Ajit Isaac, founder and CEO of Quess, said the verification process now needs just six people, and takes just a few minutes, whereas it required 35-40 people earlier working for weeks. Quess has its own verification division. But employee verification is usually outsourced to an agency that goes and checks whether the employee resides in the address provided to the employer. The agency even makes calls to the references provided by the employee to check the antecedents. This process usually takes five-seven days.

Gurgaon-based employee verification company Authbridge has been helping its clients onboard employees using Aadhaar. Bengaluru-based verification company BetterPlace has also deployed an Aadhaarbased verification solution for its clients that include Swiggy, Runnr, Dusters, Guardwell and Housejoy. "Aadhaar verification is simple enough to be done at scale," says Saurabh Tandon, COO of BetterPlace. He says people often use false identities, or use a driving licence at one place and an election ID at another place. "People even use different ID cards to rejoin the same company," he said.



Aadhaar verification will make such frauds difficult. The cost of verification using Aadhaar can be as low as Rs 15 per person. It'll be particularly useful in manpowerintensive sectors like retail and logistics. Aadhaar verification will not suffice in jobs where police verification is obligatory — for instance security guard jobs, where police verification is mandatory in most states. The employee verification is similar to what Reliance Jio did to enrol customers. It's now acknowledged that this was what enabled Jio to enrol 10 crore customers in less than six months. And where other telecom companies spent Rs 50 to verify every customer, Jio did for less than a rupee.

Quess' Isaac says hiring costs can come down by 60% using its Aadhaar platform. BetterPlace's Tandon expects many companies will use Aadhaar for employee verification once they are ready with the technology. "When they start using it, they see a lot of value in it," he said. According to Isaac, Quess' verification tool was developed by Heptagon Technologies, a company it acquired recently. It is now opening the platform for third-party users. "Since we started implementing it, we've got requests from companies to use our software. Surprisingly, even wealth management companies want to use it as a tool to onboard customers, because Aadhaar now has bank accounts and PAN card linked to it," he said.