Over 60 percent of HR professionals are very unprofessional, in that they don’t think you need to run a background check. Here is some data to set them straight.Here are three of the most common, courtesy of Fast Company:

1. Inflated roles According to an Office Team report, 76% of candidates embellished job experience, and 55%exaggerated their job duties.In an effort to get to where they want to go career-wise, job-seekers will put down the titles of jobs they believed they deserved as opposed to their actual work roles.What to look for: Vague descriptions of skills that aren’t consistent with what your job posting actually demands.

2. Suspicious dates Job-seekers know gaps in employment tend to raise red flags for recruiters and HR pros. As a result, they tend to get creative in covering up those gaps.Example: Date blocks that only include the year, instead of the starting/ending month.

3. Lack of degree specificity Education is a huge area for misrepresentation. While there are a few brazen folks who have the guts to put down big-name schools they never even attended, that type of liegenerally isn’t what you have to worry about.A far more common fib comes from candidates that put down degrees they never earnedor fell just short of earning.What to look for: Incomplete degree names. For example, someone may put bachelor’s degree instead of Bachelor of Science (BS) or bachelor of fine arts (BFA).

To be safe, you’ll want to make sure all degree specs were met and the candidate isn’t among the individuals who lie about something they never actually completed.All of this goes to underscore the overwhelming need for background checks. With potential applicants lying without restraint and HR employees not doing their job, there is no real way to establish a reliable hiring mechanism without including professional background screening as a part of it.

And this needs to be done by a reliable company, one that can verify its results to make sure that they are accurate.This means that online background checks don’t cut it.