You wouldn’t buy a car sight-unseen, or take a vacation without knowing the details of what to expect when the plane landed or boat docked. So why hire an employee without knowing what background information might pose a potential risk?
Employers are advised to conduct employment screening services for a number of reasons, including checking for criminality in a prospective employee’s background. It’s an effective way to help ensure the right candidate is hired, and mitigates risk.
“Pre-employment screening is designed to verify information supplied by candidates on their resumes and applications. Investigations are also conducted to uncover character flaws and criminal tendencies that might jeopardize the employer, tarnish its reputation, endanger staff, or limit the effectiveness of the candidate,” writes Alison Doyle for The Balance Careers.
“Screening is often done to determine if employees can be trusted to manage financial resources or protect sensitive or confidential information.”
Employment screening services can also be used for employment reference and social network reports, credit checks, and international criminal background discoveries. Essentially, all information critical to the hiring process and due diligence requirements.
Reference checks, writes Rob Starr for Small Business Trends, is an area of particular importance for employers. “Reference checks give (employers) a good idea of who they are considering since past performance often dictates future expectations.”
Failure to Elicit Employment Screening Services Results in Risk and Liability
Not conducting pre-employment screening can land an employer in all sorts of trouble, especially if criminality is involved. One of the first considerations should be establishing credentials, making sure an employee is who they say they are in terms of education, experience. A bad hire could cost in terms of credibility, and also monetarily.
“If you don’t confirm how a person is representing themselves, and make a poorly informed hiring decision as a result, it could be incredibly costly to your company—in more ways than one,” writes Lauren Small for Greenhouse Blog.
“According to Fast Company, one quarter of companies surveyed estimated that a bad hire cost them at least $50,000 in the past year. A bad hire results in lost time and expenses due to the need to recruit and train another new hire, as well as a negative impact on employee morale and a decrease in overall team and company productivity.”
Potential perils of a bad hire include endangering customers and employees, cyber-security risks, and consequences of not adhering to due diligence requirements.
“Avoid wasting your valuable time and efforts on toxic hires. You have enough to do in your day without having to worry about your business or people being in jeopardy due to untrustworthy new hires,” she continues.
Investigative Solutions Network uses its own online portal system when processing pre-employment screening requests, allowing our background screening analysts to provide efficient, comprehensive and confidential background checks. The benefit to our clients is the ease of electronically submitted requests as well as the ability to check the status of a report and view the results online.
For more information on our pre-employment screening services, please contact us today.