6 Essential Background Check Steps for Due Diligence While Hiring Employees

An Employee is the most significant valuable asset for the employer, just as the recruitment process becomes an essential daily activity for them to succeed in. For example, you must know the struggle of finding the best fashion in a shop with all the trends. Similarly, finding potential employees with an excellent technological aspect of knowledge from the pool of LinkedIn (because it is mostly used) is also tricky. To get through this without any issues, employers always perform some background checks to identify their potential candidates.

Background checks have not been highlighted as much before hiring a person but it has more serious disadvantages if not done properly. To not know the person you’re hiring can cause legal issues, reputation risk, increased staff attrition and many other problems.

If you haven’t done background checks for employees, then here is a chance to get started to reduce the number of bad hires.

What Is a Background Check?

A background check is a process of analyzing the candidate’s history to hire them. It gives them a clear idea about the candidate’s nature and capabilities and an assurance of who the candidates claim to be. It also helps in building a sense of understandability and trust among the candidate and employer.

People always take reviews from others before purchasing any product, movie, and restaurant to confirm their quality and stability. Likewise, observing employment history, educational qualification, criminal and financial history is always fruitful for the company.

Despite the assurance of the truthfulness of the candidate screening, this check also helps employers define the workplace’s right environment.

The company can make background checks itself or can use some other outsourcing agency to do it. As this is their fundamental task, they can have a broader search into the candidate’s employment history. But before you proceed, ensure to have written consent of the same from the candidates to follow the statutory guide and include a consistent process without any bias.

Why does the Employer Need to do a Background Check?

Sometimes candidates lie about details that may harm the business reputation, and you certainly don’t want that. It may be intentional or unintentional.

As it is the last step of any candidate recruitment, it helps in ensuring improved hiring decisions. But there are many areas where the background check helps employers.

Job Competence

With the high expectations of employers, tight market conditions, hundreds of freshers looking for jobs, extraordinary qualifications, it becomes hard to figure out the employees’ capability. But with a background check on the candidates, you can find out the best suited for the job role.

Workplace Safety

The employer’s fundamental duty is to establish a safe working environment that leads to formulating a good bonding between the employees, customers, and visitors. What if your newly recruited employee is harmful or disturbing your workplace environment. Thus it becomes essential to have a background check to know if the employee is safer to make a part of the company.

Target Achievement

To grow and succeed in the targets, the employees must actively participate in the process with full enthusiasm for better output.They should be honest about what they want to achieve and work to bring the best for the company. However, the manager can embrace an effective performance management software to keep track of the employees’ targets.

Honesty

While recruiting the candidates, the employer also tests them for their honesty and whether they have a proper qualification for the job or not. Including false data in the resume or during the screening process is a sign of dishonesty and harmful nature.

Workplace Theft

Sometimes the imposter is present from the victim party only. The regular loss of assets and other company belonging may be due to an employee who wrongly takes place. Company belongings also include meeting data, targets, and additional sensitive information that may win the competitors.

All of these loose ends come to an end when you have a proper pre-employment screening done.

How to Perform a Background Check?

It is understood that performing a pre-check of candidates is better for the reputation of the company, but how? It is not easy to receive the information that helps in deciding the employee capability and cut out the band hires. Also, before starting the same, the employee should agree with the company performing his check.

Background checks can be done in different steps listed below.

1. Ask for Permission

Before researching for past history, it is essential to ask the person (whose background check is to be done) and receive their permission to start the examination. Ensure that you have written consent of the same.

According to laws and acts, the company is required to highlight its intention and need for the same, but it is the candidate’s option to approve it or not. The government generally prohibits hindering the privacy of an individual which includes checking the past history of employees also.

2. Ensure the Legality of the Check

The government always protects their citizen’s rights and background checks are one of their rights. Every state has its own rule for giving options to the employees in running pre-employment checks, and thus the company must follow the rules.

Many rules forbid checking an employee’s employment, criminal, educational history. To ensure statutory security, it is good to follow the laws and ask the candidates before the pre-employment check.

3. Ask References

While considering candidates for the role, LinkedIn plays an essential part in the recruitment process to gather candidates who are looking for the job. Similarly, you can ask various references from the candidate’s name about their behavior.

For example, you can ask their previous employer about employment history, their friends about nature and interaction, etc. it will help you in trusting the information that candidates show. Though checking the references takes much time, it becomes an essential step in the process.

Many companies have referral hiring as their fundamental process of recruitment. It also ensured that such employees might have a good employment history and no dangerous records, just because one of your trustworthy employees referred them. Thus references tell a lot about the personality and skills of the candidate.

4. Perform Drug Tests

For an employer with a comparative number of employees, it is essential to establish a safer place to work. And thus employers need to confirm if the candidate inputs any drug or other harmful intakes.

Such things are contagious, and you don’t want other employees to be involved and degrade the quality of work. Thus after an employee is selected, they have to go for drug tests. It could be as the government laws that one has to follow.

For example, you must have heard that the candidates are required to undergo physical checkups that include drug tests. Such a condition is critical to follow for the recruitment of civil services, transportation, and other government jobs.

5. Ask Outsourcing Agencies

Recruiters certainly have so much to achieve when it comes to hiring employees, and background checks require a lot of time to finalize the hire. Thus for a large company, it is best to hire an outsourcing background check agency to get the work done parallelly.

The results they provide are faster and more accurate than the ones you find on your own. Additionally, as it is their daily job, they assure 100% compliance for the laws.

However, if you don’t want to include others in your processes, it is better you use websites and applications to check criminal, educational and other records of the candidates.

6. Offer Second Chance

At last, you can offer the candidates a chance to clear their mistakes and accept their truth. Sometimes the candidates find it hard to tell the truth, due to any criminal or harmful records, but their skills are extraordinary. Such candidates can be assured to offer the job if they accept not to make such mistakes again.

What are the Advantages of Performing Background Checks?

Background checks are always regarded as a fruitful practice to ensure a safer and productive workplace environment. There are many benefits of performing such checks for your company, as shown below.

They can:

• Avoid bad hires
• Increase employee retention
• Improves workplace productivity
• Saves enough time
• Helps establish a safer environment
• Protects the business information
• Enhances the quality of employees
• Build up references network

Trends That Emphasize The Significance Of Background Checks

• The number 1 priority of background checks is to hire the right talent. This includes evaluating the candidate based on the qualifications and character as well. However, more than 51% of the companies overlook the latter aspect.
• It is discovered that above 40% of the submitted resumes contain either false or exaggerated information.
• Inadequate background checks of the candidate may lead to a replacement within a short duration. Moreover, the cost of such bad hires is about 3X more than the salary of the specified job.
• About 6% of a company’s annual revenue is lost in the name of employee fraud, which still is the result of a flawed hiring process.
• A shocking fact discovered is that more than 18% of the total violations are identified to be workplace violations. Thus, background checks cannot be overlooked.

Conclusion

Though it is hard to attempt such practices, you can use many options to check the quality of your hires. A background check helps in maintaining the reputation of the company along with the employee attrition. It helps in increasing the productivity of employees and improving the hiring decisions of recruiters. After all, it is on you if you want to remain safe than to be sorry afterwards.

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