Work experience reference check

[CorporateLaw101]

Hey @Jessica Booker

I have a few questions regarding referees I was hoping you could answer.

I’m in a bit of a strange situation. In my work experience sections for VAC schemes I have put down the company names that I have ‘worked’ for but I have always technically been a contractor. All of my roles have been sales related and I have been paid commission without a salary. I have also never been registered as self employed or submitted any self assessment filings because I have never earned over the personal threshold. I realise this is probably a massive oversight and I’m terrified that a reference agency is going to pick this up if I am offered a VAC or TC. I obviously have transactional proof of money coming into my account but am still worried!

Also, for a separate venture I was a director of a company. How will an agency gain a reference for this? Will they bother?

Thanks for all of your help!

 

[CorporateLaw101]

Also, I have noticed that there are some minor errors in my application.
1. I got a D grade in my Physics GCSE but put a C.
2. All of my work experience have lasted over a year but since I was never registered as self employed etc I beleive the start and finish dates to be out by a few months.

should I email grad recruitment and explain these discrepancies now or will this look badly on my applications?

 

[Jessica Booker]

Hey @Jessica Booker

I have a few questions regarding referees I was hoping you could answer.

I’m in a bit of a strange situation. In my work experience sections for VAC schemes I have put down the company names that I have ‘worked’ for but I have always technically been a contractor. All of my roles have been sales related and I have been paid commission without a salary. I have also never been registered as self employed or submitted any self assessment filings because I have never earned over the personal threshold. I realise this is probably a massive oversight and I’m terrified that a reference agency is going to pick this up if I am offered a VAC or TC. I obviously have transactional proof of money coming into my account but am still worried!

Also, for a separate venture I was a director of a company. How will an agency gain a reference for this? Will they bother?

Thanks for all of your help!

I’m self employed and have to provide similar references so probably a good person to answer this from a candidate perspective and a recruitment perspective.

If the roles were of a short nature and spread across different tax years, then the fact you earned under the tax threshold will be fairly self explanatory. Be mindful though that a tax return would still have to be completed if you earned more than £1,000 even if you didn’t need to pay tax and that the firm may ask you for your self assessment to show your earnings were under the limit. They could also still ask for a personal reference from any of your clients (I regularly get asked this) or ask for other forms of documentation, such as contracts/invoices/payments made online.

How thorough they will be depends on the firm, what other references they can obtain and how this fits into your work profile. The more reliant you are on this for your work experience as a whole, the more likely they will dig into it.

As a director of a company, the same logic applies. They will want to see either a form of tax return on the dividends earned, or potentially speak to someone like another director or the company’s accountant.

This is actually quite common where lots of firms recruit self employed people (especially recently with the IR35 tax legislation changes) so firms will have a set of principles :standards they will work to for these reference processes.

 

[Jessica Booker]

Also, I have noticed that there are some minor errors in my application.
1. I got a D grade in my Physics GCSE but put a C.
2. All of my work experience have lasted over a year but since I was never registered as self employed etc I beleive the start and finish dates to be out by a few months.

should I email grad recruitment and explain these discrepancies now or will this look badly on my applications?

Wait until you find out if you have been invited to interview and then update the firm at that point.

I’ll be honest, such discrepancies on applications will not look great as ultimately each one will be considered an error, but one where your integrity can be brought into question.

It really depends how many errors are there though - if all of your work experience entries are out by a few months this will be concerning, especially if the actual work experience entries are only a matter of months long too (eg if the proportion of error is a significant percentage of the actual time worked, then it is more concerning than if it was a low amount).