How do I verify a candidate's CV is genuine in Nigeria?

A CV is a document the candidate wrote, about themselves, to get this job. It has no author but them, no editor, and no cost attached to overstatement. Treating it as evidence and then trying to authenticate it is starting from the weakest possible position.

And most CV dishonesty is not forgery. Forgery is rare and, when it happens, it is usually crude. What is common is inflation: a six-month contract written as a year, a team member described as the person who led it, a title upgraded on the way out, a gap smoothed over by stretching the dates either side of it. None of that shows up in a document check, because the document is real. The claim inside it is the thing that is bent.

So the question to answer is not "is this paper genuine". It is "is this story true, and does it hold up when I push on it". A person who did the work can talk about it for twenty minutes at a level of detail that cannot be improvised. A person who was adjacent to the work runs out of specifics in three.

Take the CV chronologically, oldest role first, and spend real time on each one. Oldest first matters: people are unguarded about jobs they think no longer count, and the pattern you find there is usually the same pattern in the recent role they have rehearsed.

For each role, get four things: what the job actually was on a normal day, what measurably changed while they were there, who they reported to by name and title, and why they left. Then follow the specifics. If they say they grew something, ask from what to what, over how long, and what they personally did that caused it. If they say they led a team, ask how many people, who hired them, and who was the hardest to manage and why.

Truthful answers get more specific under pressure. Inflated ones get more abstract - the language slides toward "we", toward strategy, toward things that cannot be checked. That drift is the signal. You are not trying to catch anybody out; you are giving an honest candidate the room to prove the claim and an exaggerating one the room to notice they cannot.

Write down the names, titles and dates as they say them. Two things come from that list: the reference calls you will make, and a record you can compare against what the referee says later.

This single sentence, said at the start of the process rather than at the end, does more verification work than any check you can buy. When a candidate knows that a specific former manager will be on a call, the cost of an exaggeration changes before they have made it. Honesty rises when lies get expensive.

It also changes who applies, and who withdraws. People occasionally disappear at the reference stage. That is information, and it arrived free.

The reference call itself only works if you ask for judgment rather than confirmation. HR-provided referees confirm dates. A former line manager tells you what the person was like to work with, which is the thing you actually need.

• Insist on the direct manager, not a colleague, a friend, or whoever HR routes you to. "Who did you report to, and can we speak to them?" is a fair question at finalist stage.
• Ask the manager to describe what the person was responsible for, then compare it silently to what the candidate told you. Gaps between the two versions are the finding.
• Ask where they ranked the person among people doing similar work, and what it would have taken to move them higher.
• Ask directly: would you hire them again? A pause before the answer carries more information than the answer.
• Ask what the person needed from a manager to do their best work. It is the least defensive question on the list and often the most revealing.

Document verification in Nigeria is real and routine, but it is slower and more manual than people expect, and each channel proves a narrow thing. Verify at the source: a scanned certificate emailed by the candidate proves nothing, because the scan is exactly what a fabricator would produce.

• Degrees: Nigerian universities and polytechnics confirm graduation through their registrar or records office, usually on a written request with the candidate's consent and their matriculation number. Ask for the matric number, not just the certificate.
• Secondary results: WAEC and NECO both operate result-checking services, and the confirmation comes from them rather than from a printout the candidate supplies. Relevant mostly for junior and entry-level roles.
• NYSC: the discharge certificate is verifiable through NYSC, and its absence is worth asking about rather than assuming. Exemption and exclusion are both legitimate, and both have their own paperwork.
• Professional licences: bodies such as ICAN, NBA, COREN, MDCN and their equivalents maintain membership records and will confirm whether someone is currently in good standing. For a role where the licence is the job, this check is not optional.
• Employers: confirm with the company's HR directly, using contact details you found yourself rather than the ones on the CV. Where the former employer is small or no longer trading, CAC records at least establish whether the company existed.
• Third-party background-check providers operate in Nigeria and will run identity, address, employment, education and criminal-record checks as a package. Useful when you are hiring at volume or into a role handling money, and worth comparing on scope and consent handling rather than on speed alone.

Individually, none of these prove anything. Two or three together, in the same application, are worth slowing down for.

• Dates that only exist as years, hiding gaps of several months at both ends.
• A former manager who cannot be named, or who turns out to be a friend, a sibling, or someone who has conveniently relocated abroad.
• Achievements described entirely in the first person plural, with no answer to "what did you personally do".
• A title that does not match the size or stage of the company it sits under.
• Certificates supplied as images with no matric number, no serial, and no institution that answers a phone.
• Resistance to the reference stage that appears only once the reference stage is imminent.

Verification costs money and time, and the temptation is either to skip it entirely or to try to apply it to everyone. Both are wrong. Nobody should be running document checks on 200 applicants. Run the deep dive on everyone you interview, because it costs you nothing but attention, and run the paid verifications on the two people you are actually choosing between.

And verify only what the hire depends on. For a finance analyst, the ICAN standing and the last employer matter and the 2011 diploma does not. For a driver, the licence is the whole check. For a graduate hire with no employment history, the degree and the NYSC certificate are the only claims there are. Deciding this before you start is what stops the process from either bloating or being abandoned halfway.

Tezera helps at the interrogation end of this. It generates the history-stage questions from the candidate's own claims rather than a generic list, pushes on the specifics that a written CV leaves vague, and surfaces contradictions between what a candidate says at different stages instead of smoothing them over. The limitation is important: it does not perform document verification. It will not call a university registrar or confirm an ICAN membership, and it cannot tell you a certificate is forged. Those checks stay yours, or your provider's. What it can do is make sure that by the time you spend money verifying someone, you are verifying the right two people, and you already know which claims are load-bearing.

The same question, phrased the other ways people ask it. Every one of them lands on this page.

• How do I check if a Nigerian candidate is lying on their CV?
• How do I verify a degree certificate in Nigeria?
• How do employment background checks work in Nigeria?
• How do I confirm a candidate really worked where they say they did?

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Everything else we have written like this sits on the answers index.