THE NATIONAL SKILLS REGISTRY Bridging the Gap between Employees and Hirers

Nasscom.in, November, 2009

The Indian IT-BPO industry has been facing a significant challenge in the area of hiring, where companies have been unable to verify the credentials of the people applying for jobs in their organizations. Recognizing this concern, NASSCOM has set up a system that serves as a reliable reference mechanism for prospective employees.

Referred to as the National Skills Registry (NSR), the initiative aims to uniquely identify employees, to prevent ID theft and filter out the undesirable elements. The idea is to instill confidence in member companies regarding their employees and ensure organizational security. The NSR facilitates the recruitment process and eliminates the costs involved in conducting repeated background checks for the same employees, when they change jobs. It has emerged as a standardized inexpensive approach for conducting background checks on employees, to ensure an acceptable level of reliability. The NSR is a global security best practice approach, to address personnel identity and background verification.

The effort is currently on to institutionalize NSR under NASSCOM’s trusted sourcing framework, which is based on the four pillars of Engagement, Education, Enactment and Enforcement.

Unique features and usability drive NSR usage


The NSR initiative has gained momentum with over 79 companies registering on its site. Around 502,000 employees have registered on the web and the fingerprints of 305,000 employees have been captured online. Over 125 permanent PoS set-ups in 17 cities are functional, and 14 background verification companies have been empanelled.

The NSR’s success lies in its unique features, including its ‘one person, one profile’ design approach. The registry ensures that only objectively verifiable data of an individual is recorded to create a profile. This data is independently checked by NSR empanelled background checking companies, which incidentally, are ISO 27001 certified and are required to follow standard operating procedures for verification.

The NSR record is an objective and verifiable fact sheet about each registered individual and contains personal information apart from details on academic qualifications, work experience and biometrics (photographs and fingerprints).

Empowering employees

The registry takes care of privacy issues, giving complete ownership of data to the registered individuals. They can log in, self register and view and update their profile on the web (www.nationalskillsregistry.com). The NSR allows them to restrict access to their profiles. Companies subscribing to the NSR can access these profiles using their digital signature certificates, provided they have been authorized by the individuals.

Companies meanwhile, can view the verification results for their employees. They can also choose the background checker, and the details to be checked.

Security is being maintained by the NSR, through special PINS and passwords, firewalls, robust intrusion detection systems, digital signature certificates, audit trails and encrypted data transmission, The NSR is being managed and hosted by the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL), a decade-old depository, managing large, nation-wide databases. NSDL currently services 10 million investors holding securities worth USD 900 billion. It is represented at more than 9,300 locations in over 960 cities and towns. The NSDL provides best-in-class security for the data hosted.

The data elements that the registry does not currently capture are appraisal ratings of previous employers, the circumstances and the nature of exit from a previous employer, criminal records, drug and substance abuse, financial information, salary structures of previous jobs and litigation records. However, efforts are on, to include some of these features, as well, in order to enhance the relevance of the registry to both employees and IT-BPO hirers.