Dear Are you Serious,
I think you may have misinterpreted my last message so I will explain the recruitment process at my company to you. Your new organisation may do things differently.
Step 1 - Ask the candidate to complete an Employment Application form when he/she comes to the 1st interview. On that form, he/she has to state his/her current & last salaries and also the last 5 jobs that he/she has held. Furthermore, the form also asks the person to provide 3 referees whom HR can contact to do reference checks. NOTE - The referees must be people whom the candidate has worked closely with and must be in a position to comment on the person's performance. The referees must be more senior to the candidate i.e. they must either be his/her immediate boss, the department head, the Regional Head or another senior colleague. Personal references from relatives, friends and doctors are not acceptable because they are usually not objective. Also, Personal referees usually have never worked closely with the candidate and therefore cannot comment on his/her ability to perform a certain job.
Step 2 - Make sure that the candidate has signed the declaration on the back of the application form stating that all info that he/she has written on the form is correct.
Step 3 - HR interviews the candidate. If the candidate is good, HR will then recommend him/her to the hiring manager/s for a second round of interview.
Step 4 - If the hiring manager/s feel that the candidate is the right person for the job, they might arrange for him/her to meet the department head or Regional Head.
Step 5 - If all of the managers think that they have found the right person for the job, they will ask HR to make an offer to the candidate and do reference checks.
Step 6 - HR will call the candidate and make an offer to that person. HR will also tell the candidate that the offer is subject to reference & salary checks. HR will then ask the candidate to come in and sign the offer letter. At the same time, HR will request that the candidate bring in an original copy of a payslip along with original copies of his university degrees and transcripts.
Step 7 - The candidate comes into HR and is given 2 copies of the offer letter. He/she then reads through the offer letter. The HR person will then ask the candidate if he/she has any questions about the offer letter and needs things to be clarified. Once the candidate is happy with the offer letter, he/she will be asked to sign both copies. One copy is for him/her to keep and the other one is for HR to put onto their Personnel files. At this time, the HR Manager will also request that the candidate submit a copy of his/her current payslip so that it can be photocopied & checked. HR will also ask for a copy of the person's passport & FIN card if the person is a foreigner or a copy of the NRIC card if the person is a local. If the candidate doesn't want to hand over a payslip or doesn't have a payslip, then HR will ask if it's OK to call the candidate's HR department to check salary info. NOTE - We never call the HR department of another company to check an employee's salary without getting the candidate's permission first.
A lot of candidates are very surprised that our company will reference check them. When they first filled out an application form, they really never suspected that we would go ahead and reference check them at the offer stage, so they just write whatever they want on the form. Actually, a number of candidates get very nervous when we ask them if it's OK to call their referees to do reference checks.
Once the employee has provided us with 3 referees, we then ask him/her if it's OK for us to call the referees directly. NOTE - We don't do verbal reference checks without the candidate's consent.
By the way, when we conduct verbal reference checks with previous or current bosses of the candidate, we usually ask them to confirm dates of employment, the candidate's position in the company, his/her duties & responsibilities, level of performance, ability to get along with peers/subordinate & managers as well as salary info. This is pretty standard.
I am not too sure which MNC you are about to join but I have worked in the banking & finance industry for over 20 years and I can tell you that a lot of the financial institutions in Singapore conduct reference checks in a similar way to our organisation.
Back home in Australia though, we never used to ask a candidate to produce a payslip. In additon, we would always conduct 2 verbal reference checks with previous employers before making an offer to a candidate. In Singapore, everything is done the other way around i.e. the offer is made first and then the reference checks are done later. Also, back in Oz, reference checks were only done after we had received the candidate's permission to do so.
I don't think our way of doing things is gross misconduct as you have described.
Speaking about gross misconduct - Another thing you have to realise is that quite often, headhunters conduct reference checks on senior candidates by picking up the phone and calling their current & previous bosses, without them knowing about it. They also speak to some of the candidates' ex-colleagues & current colleagues to find out whether the person is good or not. A lot of these so-called phone calls are done without the person's consent. At least when HR people do reference and salary checks, we usually ask the candidate for his/her permission first before we call the referee up.
By the way, in your original message, you asked people on this message board whether or not it is an "invasion of your privacy" for HR to ask you for a payslip. You then went on and asked "has anyone else experienced this and refused to comply. I feel its just HR trying to cross the "T's" and dot the "I's". I then went on to explain the reason why HR Dep'ts do this. You first sounded like you were p*ssed off with your HR dep't and then you had a go at me when I replied to your message.
I also found it interesting that you managed to call your HR department on a Sunday morning and that they told you that "they would let me go for misconduct". Believe me, most HR people in Singapore don't work on Sundays. I know because I'm usually the only one who goes into the office on weekends!
Anyway, I hope you are happy with your job offer and that everything works out well for you.
Good luck.
