How Background Check Services Can Help Hire the Right Candidates
A background check is a crucial step that helps employers make informed hiring decisions. Whether it’s a criminal record check or verification of an applicant’s education or employment history, it ensures that the information on their resume is accurate.
It also helps prevent negligent hiring lawsuits. Here are a few reasons companies should incorporate background checks into their hiring process.
Avoid Bad Hires
A bad hire can be a significant liability for any business. They can cause damage to your company’s reputation and cost you time and money in recruitment, training, and lost productivity. Background checks help ensure your company only hires responsible and trustworthy employees who can protect customers, co-workers, and team members.
Background checks can also identify red flags that may signal a lack of character for certain positions, like customer-facing roles or jobs with access to confidential information. This helps to reduce negligent hiring lawsuits.
A fast, transparent background check process can also improve the candidate experience and create an excellent first impression of your company. A system gives candidates real-time visibility into the status of their report so they can understand the turnaround time and be prepared for the results.
Reduce the Risk of Fraud
When a company hires someone who turns out to be untrustworthy, it can cause financial loss and damage its reputation. This is especially true for companies with regulated industries like healthcare, where wrong hiring can lead to costly lawsuits and fines.
Moreover, background check services help to ensure that the candidate’s identity matches their resume and can verify important information such as education, criminal record, government-issued licenses, etc. They can also use some systems to check for extra candidate data, such as social media profiles, email address profiling, etc.
This helps to reduce the risk of fraud and keep your company and employees safe. These checks can also flag applicants whom ID thieves may have duped.
Ensure Workplace Safety
Background checks can help you keep your workplace safe by ensuring that candidates have the qualifications they claim to have. These services include identity verification, education verification (degrees and universities), professional license verification, and employment history verification.
Some job applicants misrepresent their qualifications or past work experience on their resumes. A background check can reveal these discrepancies, making it easier to spot the right fit for your business.
Dishonest staff can cost your company in terms of lost productivity, lower morale, and financial losses resulting from legal fees or bad publicity. Regular background checks can help prevent these costly mistakes by vetting potential hires before they become full-time employees. These checks can also help you maintain regulatory compliance by ensuring your hiring practices are up to code.
Prevent Discrimination
Hiring and training new staff takes a lot of time and money. But if your candidate’s past turns out to be more complicated than you thought, it could cause complex problems to fix. For example, a background check might reveal a history of violence or drug abuse. This can affect your ability to build trust in the workplace and put customers and employees in danger.
In addition, federal law protects job applicants from discrimination based on race, national origin, color, religion, sex, and disability. It’s also illegal to use information found in a background check unfairly. Consider the applicant’s explanation if you find a red flag, such as poor credit history.
Increase Productivity
Background checks help identify suitable candidates for your open roles in a highly competitive hiring market. A thorough pre-employment screening process can include verification of education, professional licenses, and motor vehicle records to ensure your team is well-equipped for their roles and responsibilities.
Additionally, a fast background check turnaround time can increase productivity by allowing you to fill roles more quickly. This helps you improve customer and employee satisfaction while reducing the risk of negligent hiring claims due to unsuitable hires.
Use data on time-to-complete to identify bottlenecks in your background check process and determine solutions. For example, a simple, user-friendly background check experience that includes easy access to consent and authorization forms, automated reminders, and integration with your system can reduce the completion time.