The Growing Importance Of Employee Background Checks

Today, the process of hiring new employees has become one of the single most important aspects of any company's procedures. The simple fact is that hiring the wrong people can have a tremendous influence on a business' success or failure. Finding a good private investigator who can conduct employee background checks is a must. If you're not convinced, just look at a few of the statistics involved in the hiring and screening process.

• 44% of all driving records checked turn up serious flags
• 10% of education checks find flags and discrepancies
• 10% of criminal checks turn back issues as well
• 23% of employment verification checks lead to flags

These numbers refer to the percentage of discrepancies on an application or resume – instances where the person applying for the job is being less than honest. In some cases it's a simple memory error, but in other cases it's outright fraud and can lead to a company hiring an employee who might not actually be a good fit for their team.

If you're still not sure that turning to employee background checks is something worth doing, think about some of the resulting issues that can arise from hiring the wrong employee.

• On average, a company loses around 5% of its total annual revenue to occupational fraud. This could be something major like using the company credit card, or something minor like stealing a stapler, but employees who commit occupational fraud can hurt your business.
• It costs around 3 times the salary of a position to replace a bad hire in that position. In other words, hiring the wrong person could lead to triple the costs of hiring the right person in the first place.
• Companies have literally gone out of business due to fraud or other issues caused by a bad hire.
• On a more extreme note, statistics show that workplace violence makes up around 18% of all violent crime in America.

In short, your company's future and the safety of your current employees depends on you making the right decisions during the hiring process. As a result, you need to pay careful attention to every aspect of who you're hiring. This includes running a comprehensive background check on potential employees to find out the truth about their history and what they could be hiring. It may not sound like something you want to do, but these days it's necessary to keep your business running properly.