China Law Blog

Big scandal going on in Korea right now where many leading public figures are being forced to come clean for having lied about their degrees. Korea Law Blog just did a post, entitled, "More on the Fake Degree Scandal," explaining why this is happening and what employers should be doing about it. Just substitute Chinese for Korean and China for Korea and it applies to China.

KLB starts out describing the problem:

Fakes are endemic in Korean corporations, says the International Herald-Tribune yesterday. And we’re not talking about fake handbags—society is grappling with the problem of fake people who claim degrees they don’t have.

How do all these fakes get themselves hired? And why do Korean employers emphasize the degree to such an extent? According to the IHT, it’s because employment background checks are useless:

Although some companies conduct their own aptitude tests to detect the best job candidates, the dependence on academic degrees persists.

The post goes on to quote from the IHT article on how personal recommendations are seldom useful because when Koreans talk about other people, they tend to focus only on their good points.

KLB states that his experience tells him "that the idea of the 'worthless' background check is overstated.

The truth is, while the critics are correct in that former employers are reluctant to offer frank comments on a past employee, in our practice we often find that the background check is not done at all. And that failure allows the real fakers—those who never went to the university they claim, who overstate their degree, or who claim work experience they don’t actually have—to get in.

KLB's advice is to "slow down, and double-check everything. Speed kills."

For China too.