5 signs your organization is ready for pre-employment screening

With 95% of employers performing background screening on job candidates these days, those that aren’t are at a significant disadvantage. Given the complexities of employment screening, organizations often partner with a pre-employment screening company to ensure their processes are lawful and effective.

If you don’t implement pre-employment screening at your organization, consider the following signs as sure indications that you might consider getting a pre-employment screening company on board and a screening process set up:

1. You hire people who are put in positions of trust

Employees with access to money, financial records, or secure databases can cause huge problems if they don’t turn out to be trustworthy. It’s not just the direct consequences of any negative employee actions (such as theft, or putting the organization at risk of legal action) that an organization may suffer from, but also the long-term ripples that come from a disrupted work environment, expensive lawsuits, loss of workforce and, ultimately, the effect on profits.

2. You don’t have a team member committed to knowing latest local, state, and federal regulations

Regardless of how meticulous you are, it’s incredibly difficult to stay abreast of all the regulations and legislation in place around hiring and employment. It’s astoundingly complicated and constantly changing. Take one example: hiring an employee in San Francisco, California. Employers in this situation need to abide by federal, California, and the City of San Francisco employment screening regulations. While similar, they each have unique requirements that must be met and have all been updated in recent years, diverging them further still. Miss just one regulation requirement and you could be in grave trouble with the respective authority.

3. Bad hires have cost you in the past

We all make mistakes and most employers will, at some point, make a hire that they regret. In fact, according to CareerBuilder, 75% of employers said they have hired the wrong person for a position. These kinds of mistakes are avoidable, though, and certainly shouldn’t be repeated. Pre-employment screening companies tend to have the experience and expertise to reduce mistakes and improve the effectiveness of your hiring process.

4. Your employee turnover is high

Effective employment screening can go a long way toward helping reduce employee turnover. The process has been shown to reduce employee terminations due to theft, violence, and illicit drug use, and ensured better alignment between the values of new employees coming in and those of the organization. If you find employees coming in and leaving on too regular a basis, you could consider bringing in an expert to help you make the right decision the first time.

5. You have trouble finding accurate information on applicants

This is the hardest part. The truth is, there’s no singular databases to search. Any background database is an aggregate of many different databases and none of them are all-inclusive. These databases also become easily outdated or inaccurate quickly as activities go unreported.

Furthermore, verification of local, state, and federal databases is another matter entirely. Many pre-employment screening companies, like us, have teams across the country (and even in other countries), allowing us to verify the accuracy of an individual’s background at the local level. Most companies don’t have the resources to be this detail-oriented in-house.

This blog post is an excerpt from our Ultimate Employment Screening Checklist. Grab the full resource – and boost your hiring processes – here.