When hiring a new employee, hiring someone well-suited for your organisation is essential. To build a competent workforce, conducting a background check is crucial. Potential employees and applicants must fulfil certain qualification conditions and norms prescribed by the organisation they work with. Employee background verification must be on the agenda for your organisation. This is important to ensure that only honest and capable people work with you.
Working with favourable employees has several perks. It reduces the possibility of faults and mistakes. It also reduces the amount of training and orientation provided for new employees. If an employee is onboarded as per your requirements, you would not need to invest many resources in grooming them. All this crucial information can be gathered by conducting employee background checks. You can also take the help of employee background check companies equipped with the necessary guidelines to be followed during the verification process.
The following articles will discuss some helpful tips that you must heed while conducting pre-employment verification.
How to do a Background Check on your Employee?
Let us look at some tips, with the help of which, you would be able to perform employee background verification efficiently.
- Set up a Policy: There should be a definite policy for employee background verification in your company. Without a set of rules and regulations, this delicate process would not be conducted properly. A step-by-step process is crucial for everyone in the team to follow. Background checks are a matter of great value for an organisation; therefore, they must be done as per a certain course of action.
- Look for Legal Advice: While conducting background checks, you would be dealing with personal information about your potential employees. This can often take a legal turn which might put you in a difficult situation with the law. To counter this problem, you must take legal advice in advance to know what to investigate and what to avoid. The information might be sensitive, and without proper legal guidance, you might fall into trouble later on.
- Consult FCRA Agencies: Employment background check companies: that work in conjunction with FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) should be consulted before doing a background check. These agencies would help you understand FCRA guidelines and ensure that you do not do anything against the law. Look for an agency that has FCRA compliant practices and confirm their documentation. FCRA administers background checks, and any deviation is considered a criminal offence.
- Inform Applicants: Being an organisation, your potential employees must be informed that you would be performing employee background verification. Straightforwardly informing your applicants ensures future transparency between employees and the organisation. This makes sure the process of verification runs smoothly. Also, prior notification would serve as a warning for applicants who might be unfit and result in them backing out of employment.
- Scope for Clarification: Many organisations sometimes fail to obtain correct and authentic information while performing employee background checks. It is better to crosscheck crucial information while investing in potential employees. This often results in barring a competent employee from getting a job. You must give every applicant a chance to review the information collected during their background check. This helps the organisation in hiring well-suited employees. Also, applicants can have the opportunity to rectify incorrect information at their end.
- Take the process Seriously: Make sure that your hiring team takes the entire process of employee background checks seriously. The recruitment department of your company must follow the background investigation process thoroughly. Every person involved in hiring new employees must adhere to the rules and regulations related to the process. The FCRA guidelines should be taken into serious consideration while performing background checks.
- Maintain Consistency: An organisation must maintain consistency in conducting employee background checks. If you have received an application for a particular position, make sure to do background checks on all the applicants. Do not make the mistake of leaving out some applications. These may end up becoming huge mistakes in your hiring process. Any biasness and inconsistency must be avoided when conducting background checks.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a proper background check on applicants may reveal much crucial information. There are certain things that people usually do not want their employers to know. In most cases, they are personal details; yet sometimes, they can be as serious as a felony.
Pre-employment checks like education background check are also helpful in determining whether the applicant is telling the truth about their education qualification and experience. Some companies also investigate their applicants’ credit history. This helps them rule out possibilities of hiring people with bad spending habits, which often lead to embezzlement in company finances.
