The responsibilities are endless, it seems. Interviewing candidates, managing training and onboarding, tending to employee concerns, conducting performance reviews and so forth. That’s just the routine functions. Let’s not forget that Human Resources is typically on the front line when things hit the fan.
Your Human Resources department is already juggling enough. If they are also conducting pre-employment screening, you may consider relieving them of that duty. Not only is it a tremendous undertaking, but it is also challenging to utilize the screening results correctly without proper training and experience.
It is easy to find a reputable pre-employment screening services company to conduct your background checks. The prices are generally very reasonable, consider the staff hours you would tie up doing everything yourself. Plus, their knowledge and resources make the process faster and far more reliable than doing all of the work in-house.
What is the Process?
You can read about the process of criminal background checks in this blog. Instead, let’s look at the time and resources involved.
Employment and Education Verification
It can be a daunting task to contact each of your applicant’s educational institutions and former employers to verify the information on their resume. Further, none of these organizations are expecting you to call. They will likely have to dig through their archives to verify this information, sometimes taking hours or days to return a response. Consider that you usually are checking more than one applicant for each opening.
Criminal Records
It seems easy, right? Just go to that website you’ve heard about, punch in that Social Security Number, and get instant results. Nope. Those services are unreliable and should not be trusted. An accurate and reliable criminal background check requires an SSN trace to search for possible aliases or inaccuracies, and then a screening on all of these aliases at the state and federal level.
Some states won’t allow access to their records, which means you have to use county records searches, which often require a visit to that specific courthouse or the courthouse in every county the applicant has resided, but are the most accurate.
This doesn’t even take into account check on such databases like the National Sex Offender Registry, motor vehicle records, terror watch lists, etcetera.
Not only are these available resources plentiful, but they also vary wildly in reliability. Without proper training, it is difficult to know how to use the results.
Everything Else
Wait, you aren’t finished. You haven’t checked on the I-9. You might need to verify licenses or certifications. Have you checked the denied persons list or the blocked persons list? Oh, don’t forget that you need to call those references, too.
It’s a ton of work to do it all correctly, and you absolutely must do it properly to make it worth it. We recommend looking into hiring a professional to help with your pre-employment screening. Just consider the staff hours you will save. Are you already working with a background screening company? Are they taking the time to learn your business and provide you with the level of service you need to make your job easier? Call CNet if you want to learn about the difference our dedicated client success team provides to our clients.
