5 Reasons To Run Employee Screening

5 Reasons To Run Employee Screening

Being an HR professional, we have to deal with rigorous recruitment cycles and for this, we must meet with a number of candidates before closing the vacancy. Every HR person has their own style of evaluating the candidates, but one thing that needs to be kept in mind before making the final hiring decision is to “Never judge a book by its cover” (Stonehouse, 2017), since at times we might overlook some critical points, perhaps due to a fancy resume or qualification. A critical area that every HR Professional should consider before taking a candidate on board is Employee background screening.

If you are an HR professional and reading this article then I can assure you that other HR professionals must be thinking “is it worth investing additional time and money in pre-employment background screening service?” 

Let me tell you the key benefits that you can gain from conducting pre-employment background screening services:

1. Keeps you out from legal issues

Let’s suppose, one of your employees commits fraud in your company and after investigations you came to know that the employee did the same with previous employers. At this point, you will regret not conducting their background check, as if you had conducted their employment and criminal check then you wouldn’t have hired them in the first place.

2. Ensures credibility when performing sensitive tasks

In addition to legal issues, some background checks can verify a candidate’s creditability in performing their on-job duties. For instance, when a candidate is being hired for the accounts department where petty cash and the company’s account handling are their main responsibilities; their employment check may come across that his previous employment has concluded due to mishandling of accounts.

3. Keeps Employees and clients safe

Conducting Background checks can also convey a message throughout the company’s stakeholders, especially its clients, that all employees hired in the company have gone through rigorous checks. Therefore, the data shared by the clients are in safe hands, thus increasing the overall integrity of the company and its staff.

4. Verifies Education & Certification

The increase in the number of fake degrees has amplified the importance of pre-employment check of educations. Therefore, all degrees and certificates of the applicant under consideration should be verified. The outcome of verification is not just about checking the honesty of an applicant, but also verifying the legal status of the degrees and their issuing authorities.

For example, the candidate is claiming to have the ACCA degree and it is an essential educational level required for a position.  If you decide to hire that person and later you came to know that person’s degree was fake, that will reflect incompetency of the employee for the position they are holding. And consequently, will be reflected badly on part of recruitment personnel.

5. Gives an overall picture of the applicants

Apart from the interviews, pre-employment background checks can help the interviewer to make their hiring decision accordingly. For instance, candidates may have successfully cleared the interview process, but in their employment checks, the company found that they had resigned from their services after they were accused of sexual harassment by colleagues. Irrespective of the fact, how competent a candidate is for the vacancy, such red flags regarding the candidate’s behaviour can completely change the hiring decision and safeguard the company from future issues.

If your company is not conducting employee screening, think again!

It is indeed worth spending extra time and money on pre-employment background screening because making a wrong hiring decision can not only increase recruitment cost and time but may also incur the cost of damage that employee has given to the company, whether in form of litigation’s or damaging the company’s goodwill.

Being in HR, you might be creating liability for the company by making the wrong hiring decision. It’s never too late to correct your actions, so contact us and we can provide our employment background screening services. As it is rightly said and I quote, “better safe than sorry” (Bateson, 2008). For assistance in conducting background screening, contact us today or get a FREE QUOTE now!

CRI Group, based in London, works with companies across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia-Pacific as a one-stop international Risk Management, Background Screening and Due Diligence solutions provider. We have the largest proprietary network of background screening analysts and investigators across the Middle East and Asia. Our global presence ensures that no matter how international your operations are we have the network needed to provide you with all you need, wherever you happen to be. As a result, CRI Group’s global team of certified fraud examiners work as a discreet white-labelled supplier to some of the world’s largest organisations. CRI Group also holds BS 102000:2013 and BS 7858:2012 Certifications, is an HRO certified provider and partner with Oracle.

Author

Ayesha Sikander | Group HR Manager at CRI Group
e: ayesha.sikander@crigroup.com
p: +971 4 3589884 | m: +92 346 5333558