Imagup General Magazine 2024
A pre-employment background check is essential for any business because of its advantages. Not only would it help you hire the right talent, but checking your applicants’ background would also save you troubles in the future. Especially if your business deals with critical information, such as clients’ bank accounts, it’s best to verify if your applicants are trustworthy.
On the other hand, skipping a pre-employment background investigation may allow people with a possible criminal intent to infiltrate your company. To be safe, carefully assess if employing people with prior criminal activities, for instance, would not be harmful to your company. If your business is in the financial industry, especially, you might want to thoroughly scrutinize applicants with fraud and money-related cases.
For a more elaborate discussion of the benefits of a pre-employment background check, read the following.
1. Filtering Unskilled And Dishonest Applicants
When you hire highly skilled talents, you improve your hiring quality. This is one of the benefits of a pre-employment background check. Through such a procedure, you can separate the skilled from the unskilled and the qualified from the unqualified candidates.
You can also unwrap false information that applicants may have added to their resumes. By finding these inaccuracies and misinformation, you can avoid hiring individuals who’d likely commit dishonest acts in your company.
Thus, consider the tips below when verifying applicants’ resumes:
• Diligently call an applicant’s previous employers. It’s best to compare the phone numbers listed in their resumes with those listed in official business listings of their previous employers. That way, you can ensure the persons answering your call are credible.
• Designate third parties who are professionals in conducting background checks. By doing this, your human resource (HR) personnel can focus on other essential tasks.
And since these professionals are experts in this area, you won’t have to worry about how long a background check would take as they can finish it in just a couple of days.
For more details, check MicroBilt as well as similar sources to know more about background checks.
If you hire a candidate who may have misrepresented any information about them, it may potentially result in problems with the quality of your hires. Worse, it can expose your company to financial, legal, and regulatory risks. With proper background screening, you can reveal any misinformation ahead of time and prevent all potential issues from arising.
2. Avoiding Negligent Hiring Risks
Negligent hiring carries many risks, and the unfortunate thing is it leaves your company to pay for the team member’s action. It’s a sad reality that there are businesses that do not undergo strict employee background checks before hiring. As a result, they suffer the negative impacts of their negligence. And in more unfortunate situations, things like lawsuits occur, which ultimately damages the company’s reputation.
Fortunately, incidents like this can be prevented if you exert more time in conducting a background investigation. This can also save your company from spending your finances on fighting lawsuits.
3. Ensuring Compliance With Policies
If you’re an experienced HR personnel or recruiter, you know by now the law mandates companies to conduct background checks. However, you can only do this after making an offer to the applicant. This is to ensure fairness and equality among all the candidates.
According to law, background checks done before offering a job may limit an applicant’s access to job opportunities despite having enough qualifications. Such practices might promote discrimination in the workplace. Moreover, companies are also prohibited from implementing background checks based on an applicant’s race, nationality, color, religion, medical history, and similar information. When you fail to follow this rule, you may be subjected to several legal issues.
4. Preventing Potential Losses Due To Employee Dishonesty
Dishonest employees would massively impact your company as it could result in inconvenience and contribute to significant losses. Many companies have hit rock bottom due to company fraud committed by dishonest employees. In these cases, companies have lost millions of dollars, all because of hiring applicants who have the potential to commit fraud and other crimes. And this can even happen to small and medium-sized businesses.
Dishonesty and fraud are likely to have a negative effect on your whole organization. Apart from financial losses, the company may also suffer from reduced productivity and decreased team member morale. Besides that, they can also ruin your business reputation, affecting the public’s confidence in your company.
All these potential damages can, however, be prevented if there are proper background checks in place during the recruitment stage. By getting to know your candidates more, you’d be able to dodge any future losses.
5. Promoting Overall Company Safety
Another significant benefit of implementing a screening procedure on candidates is the safety and security you can provide to other employees and even customers. As an employer, it’s your responsibility to provide a safe workplace for all your employees.
Pre-employment background checks can help prevent any potential harm to your existing employees. In fact, implementing background checks before hiring shows you care enough about your current employees and worry about the safety of their environment.
With this procedure, you can ensure your workplace remains free of any potential unwanted activities and behaviors as it’d allow you to nip the bud of the problem before it even arises. Furthermore, you can prevent workplace violence resulting from assaults, bullying, or threats if you have the correct information about your applicants.
6. Tracking Behavioral Changes
Background checks should continue even if your workers have been employed for years. In cases where you offer job promotions, for example, a background check can help track behavioral changes in your employees. They may have passed the pre-background check years ago, but you never know how much they’ve changed now.
They may have been great team members initially, but they may have developed dishonesty or improper work ethics as the years passed. These include becoming addicted to gambling, drugs, and other harmful activities that may also affect your company’s well-being. Thus, a periodic background check is vital to address these kinds of problems with employees.
Conclusion
Your workers can be your asset, but if you’ve hired the wrong ones, they’re more likely to endanger your company. You can avoid this by performing a pre-employment background check to ensure they’re an excellent fit for your company and less likely to commit malicious activities that may involve your business.
You can also consider hiring a third-party company to perform such investigations for you so you could concentrate on the betterment of your business. If you don’t have the time to do background checks on your own, try seeking help instead of neglecting this vital hiring process.
