More companies now shift focus to Aadhaar for easy employee verification process

More private companies in India are now shifting their focus towards using Aadhaar to verify new employees in a bid to replace long verification process and scaling down hiring cost as well. This move is also being taken to make the hiring process paperless.

A leading business services provider, Quess, has hired over 30,000 employees for both blue collar and white collar profiles using Aadhaar verification over the last few months, The Times of India reported.

According to the founder and CEO of Quess, the verification process now only needs about six people and less than a few minutes time to complete the entire hiring process as against the 35-40 people required earlier working for long hours to verify the identity of potential candidates.

Employee verification companies like Authbridge based in Gurgaon and BetterPlace in Bengaluru are now using Aadhaar-based verification solution for their clients.

"Aadhaar verification is simple enough to be done at scale," said Saurabh Tandon, Chief Operating Officer of BetterPlace. "People even use different ID cards to rejoin the same company," he added.

The shift towards Aadhaar verification will wipe out fraud cases that companies encounter while hiring new employees.

Aadhaar gives a 12-digit unique identity number to all residents by collecting their fingerprint and iris scans. The project was initiated by the government in 2009 to reduce leakages in the country's welfare programmes.

Now, banks like HDFC, telecommunication companies like Reliance Jio and others are also using the Aadhaar ID card. 

According to reports, executives who have worked or are working with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) are launching companies or even funding start-ups that offer Aadhaar-based services and products for a fee.

Earlier this year, the government had also said that they will make quoting of Aadhaar number compulsory for key managerial personnel and directors in regulatory filings under the Companies Act.

The Centre had also made Aadhaar mandatory for opening bank accounts for financial transactions of Rs 50,000 and above.

Also, existing bank account holders have been asked to submit the Aadhaar number by December 31, failing which the account will be invalid.

"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," added Tandon.