Background Screening Blog Pre-Employ.com
A spoof of online universities by NBC’s Saturday Night Live pokes fun at a very serious problem facing employers and recruiters using educational verification during background checks in today’s tough job market – so-called “diploma mills” where, for the right price, jobseekers can purchase documents showing that they earned a diploma or degree from a college or university.
In a fake commercial for the fictitious “University of Westfield Online,” SNL performers Fred Armisen, Nasim Pedrad, Jenny Slate, and Kenan Thompson tell how the “Internet college” taught them skills such as not mentioning in a job interview that they attended an Internet college, along with valuable techniques on how to avoid responding to the question of where they went to school that include changing the subject, mumbling, and faking a heart attack. After just four months of school, the diploma mill emails graduating students a .pdf file of a diploma with an intentionally unreadable name of a school so students can supply their own preferred choice (like Yale).
