Be Sure Before You Hire: The Importance of Pre-Employment Background Checks
Looking to hire a new set of staff for your business?
It is always a gamble to hire new people for your business. Most of them are new people looking to start a career, which means no one will be available to ask about them for reference. You either hit and hire the right person, or you miss and cost your business a lot of resources.
This is why pre-employment background checks are important. Doing a background check allows you to take a deeper look at an applicant’s history. Doing so makes sure that you hire better employees, reducing your need to turnover your staff.
It also allows you to avoid cases of negligent hiring practices. There are many more reasons that stress the importance of background checks. Here is a list of why you should consider doing background checks on your candidates before you hire anyone.
1. It Ensures You Hire High-Quality Employees
Your pre-employment background screening process should have an extensive look at someone’s qualifications. This will make it so no one will be able to lie to you through their resume. Doing this makes sure that all your employees meet the qualifications and standards of your business.
Upon receiving a candidate’s resume, you should take time to look into each of his claims. Some will be easy to verify like the university they claimed to graduate from, their diploma’s authenticity, and their certificates. A lot of people buy fake diplomas because it’s easier than getting an education, after all.
Some certificates and licenses may be more tedious to confirm than others. This is because it will require a call to the agency they claim to have gotten the certificate from. Most of the time, it will take them a couple of days to call back, but the returns of this action will be worth it for your business.
You will also be able to call your candidate’s references. Their resume will often have a list of many references for their OJT or previous jobs. You can give them a call, but you can never be certain if they’re a legitimate source or a friend playing along.
To be even more thorough, you should do a check on their references as well. You can do so by asking some questions like what company they work for. Then verify if the company exists and if they worked there.
2. It Allows You to Have a Safe Work Place for You and Your Employees
Employment background checks allow you to recruit new employees that don’t pose a threat to you or your current employees. You will be able to request to see a candidate’s police clearance when interviewing them. If they don’t have one, you can tell them to get one as anyone can get a hold of one if they request it.
Their criminal record will contain the candidate’s criminal history. This will tell you of anything that the candidate did in the past that will be cause for alarm. This also comes with the candidate’s fingerprints for verification.
In this document, you will also be able to see if the candidate got arrested before. This depends on which state you’re in, though. This is because some laws prevent you from asking about arrests, but you can still ask other law agencies for more info about the previous crimes of your candidate.
Dismissed cases will also show up on the record. Even if the candidate received a not guilty verdict in a case, the criminal charges still stay on the record. This will help you determine if their crime was a case of mistaken identity or if they have a way of shaking a guilty verdict off in court.
You can also require drug testing for your candidates. No one likes having a substance abuser in their staff. This will help you weed them out and keep your staff clean of the influence.
3. It Allows You to Check Your Candidate’s Financial Responsibility
During an interview, you can ask for many things that help check a candidate’s responsibility with finances. This includes their personal finances and the business’s resources. This is an important step if you are hiring an employee to handle your business’s financial issues.
You can check the potential employee’s criminal record for any signs of embezzlement in the past. This will help you see whether they’ve been honest with you upfront. If they’ve lied to your face in the interview, how can you be sure they won’t do so while handling the business’s finances?
You can also ask your candidate’s previous employers for a reference. They will likely have had experience handling money for other businesses in the past. This will allow you to find out if they’re as good as they say they are.
You can also ask to see their credit history. This will contain information about your candidate’s responsibility with their personal finances. If they handle their finances well, they will likely be handling yours with care as well.
4. It Makes Sure You Hire Employees with a Clean Bill of Health
Health is a big issue in a business. You need to make sure that when someone gets a disease, it won’t spread to your other employees.
It’s all well and good to get seasonal sicknesses like hay fever or the flu. This is because there is medication at the ready and will treat the sickness in no time at all. However, it’s a different story when it’s a genetic disease.
Background checks give you the opportunity to look into a candidate’s health records. Here, you’re able to tell if they have any genetic sickness that raise a red flag.
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