I agree with those here who say that your salary is none of the employer' s business and that your pay should be based on experience and qualifications. I mean, according to some employers, if someone took a below-market salary to pay the bills while they searched for the "dream job", that means they do not deserve to make much more than that and the salary at their next job should be only slightly higher. Does this make sense to anyone?

Since they insist on going back 5 years, perhaps they are looking for proof of having actually worked at the places you claim you worked, not just salary. Perhaps they are trying to ensure themselves against real people at real companies giving fake references. Please. Anyone with an entry-level knowledge of design programs can manufacture something that looks like a carbon copy of the required documentation. Like another poster mentioned, it' s not that difficult to doctor a form to reflect the amount you want it to reflect. Need a letter on company stationery? Get their logo from the web site, design your own stationery, and print it out on nice paper. Chances that the hr person actually knows what a given company' s stationery looks like are slim to none. This is all such a waste of time.

Employers should just accept that, no matter what they do, THERE IS A CHANCE THAT AN APPLICANT WILL LIE AND NOT GET CAUGHT. Employers can run credit reports. They can talk to past employers who may or may not be willing to discuss the applicant' s salary history, reason for leaving, or where the applicant worked before/after they worked at XYZ company. They can talk to references, who may or may not be telling the truth. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to good old fashioned psychology and being a good judge of character, as well as to knowing what questions to ask and what tests to run to establish skill level and confirm qualifications. That' s why it seems so strange to me that companies trust people to conduct interviews who have never been properly trained in how to do that. It' s almost like employers believe that all the background screening and aptitude testing that has now become available will somehow compensate for the ineptness of the actual people conducting the interviews. Therefore, there is no need to pay experienced HR people when it' s cheaper to simply hire a bumbling college grad as HR recruiter and let the background screening companies do their thing.

I' ve worked in a position that put me in close contact with background screening companies, and things get overlooked ALL THE TIME, often knowingly. For example, if a client company' s policy as communicated to the background screening vendor requires that they only check criminal history going back 5 years, and the candidate for a store management position was arrested for embezzlement 7 years ago, the background screening company will not tell the client that. His background check will come back clear. If someone has signed a release form agreeing to a criminal history check going back 5 years, and it becomes known that the employer was aware of and based their hiring decision on information that falls outside of these parameters, that' s grounds for a law suit. Therefore, the vendor' s hands are tied. A few years ago, one of our candidates turned out to have had a rape and attempted murder conviction that fell slightly outside of the search parameters, and the only reason we found out was because the employee at the vendor company that ran crime checks for us told that to my manager "off the record". Had she not been my manager' s close personal friend, I doubt she would' ve risked her job, and the psycho would have ended up in our office.

I' m not saying it' s not important to use the available means of checking into someone' s past to weed out the obvious bad choices. The problem is that employers seem to rely more and more on paperwork, background screening, various tests and personality profiles varying in the degree of ridiculousness, and less on training their hiring managers and recruiting staff on how to properly interview candidates and ask truly useful and insightful questions. Run the checks, but don' t rely on them at the exclusion of the human element.

When employers go overboard with proofs and verifications as in this case, all they are doing is needlessly risking losing good candidates who may not be willing to comply with the unreasonable demands out of principle. All for an additional precautionary measure of questionable effectiveness. How silly. And what if they do end up paying someone 10K more based on them lying about their salary history? They obviously thought this person' s expertise was worth that much, or they wouldn' t have agreed to pay them this salary. So what' s the problem?