Understanding discrepancies in employment history

What a discrepancy is

A discrepancy means the candidate-provided value and the source-confirmed value differ. It is a documented fact about two records — not a finding of dishonesty. Treating every mismatch as a red flag is the fastest way to make a bad hiring decision from good data.

The usual suspects

Payroll systems record the first day on payroll, not the accepted-offer date. People remember calendar seasons, not pay periods. Titles differ between the org chart, the payroll export and the business card. Staffing placements blur who the employer of record was. Most discrepancies trace to one of these — visible immediately when the values sit side by side.

• Start dates: offer date vs first payroll date
• Titles: working title vs payroll title
• Employer: staffing agency vs client site
• End dates: last day worked vs last day on payroll

How HVR records them

Both values, side by side, each attributed to its source, with the verification method and date. The result reads 'conflicting information' — never a score, never an adjudication. Where the candidate supplies a document that resolves the conflict, the document and its provenance are recorded too.

What to do with one

Employers: read the values before reacting; a month of drift on a multi-year tenure rarely matters, and your process should say what does. Candidates: if the source-confirmed value is wrong, dispute it — reinvestigation re-contacts the source, and a corrected version is issued if the record changes.