Employee Background Check Basics - Due Diligence Matters to Your Business

Hire slowly and fire quickly. This is a common adage among successful entrepreneurs highlighting the importance in identifying the right staff. People can put anything on a resume. They want that job, and many will say anything to get it. This is the reason it's not surprising that in a survey of employers, approximately 70% said they caught applicants not telling the truth.

As a business owner who counts on the people you hire for the productivity of your company, do you really want an employee who will lie on a resume? As a result it is crucial for you to perform a employee background check to verify the honesty of the people who seek your employment.

Also important are the details that an employee omits from his/her employment application. If someone was convicted of robbery or rape, they are not going to bring that up. The last thing your business needs is your other employees threatened by a ticking time bomb. Almost two million people every single year are attacked in the workplace by a co-worker. About 30% of businesses fail due to theft by employees. This is why conducting a proper criminal background check should be mandatory (not optional) to decrease the risk of crime in the workplace.

Due diligence can be challenging if done right. You need to verify school records and get references from former employers. Checking a number of law enforcement databases for driving records, criminal charges, and convictions takes time. It is also a very good idea these days to check social media accounts such as Twitter and Facebook to get a glimpse into the personality that the person might be hiding in an interview.

Since a full dossier is not exactly practical for most applicants, your business needs to set priorities when setting forth a due diligence process. What will be the position's responsibility? Will they be guarding valuable assets? Will they be directly interacting with customers? Do their jobs absolutely require certain prior experiences? These types of questions will help you to best allocate resources towards the background check.

When your priorities are set, you can also select the databases that are most likely to contain the records of any relevant misconduct. State and local registries in their current place of residence and where they worked before can be consulted for convictions on violent felonies. Federal databases can be consulted for crimes such as tax evasion, drug crimes, fraud, and embezzlement.

Given the many moving parts in this process, many employers decide to rely on third party services for due diligence work. These experts are familiar with all the criminal databases and sources of information. They also bring economies of scale to the job due to the fact they process so many applications.

Background checks are a necessity in a world where a man's word is not quite what it used to be. One can either take the arduous task of doing it properly on oneself or offload that task to professional who is experienced and efficient.

Give Radius Investigations a call to find out more about their employee background screening services.