Pre employment screening: Be vigilant when hiring

These recession-stricken days have made hiring a nightmare for many employers. In their quest of achieving financial security, many employees are resorting to falsifying or twisting information about their educational and financial background in CVs. Thus a lot of undeserving candidates are getting hired for important positions. These employees are often getting fired later on, as their weaknesses are getting exposed, but by that time they have already caused substantial damage to a company’s reputation. In order to avoid hiring employees like these, more and more employers are hiring the services of a good pre employment screening agency to get the prospective employee’s background verified.

Hiring the services of a pre employment screening agency is not new. Employers have been doing it for a long time now. However, every employer must know which checks should be performed on employees by employee screening agencies. Then they will be able to select the perfect agencies that focus on those criteria. These include:

1. Getting permission from the employee: There are laws applicable in some areas that permit a prospective employer to run a background check on an employee only after the employee has given his/her written consent about it. In these cases, if an employee refuses to give his/her consent, it can be the perfect reason to reject his/her application on the spot, because it clearly indicates he/she has hidden or lied about some facts.
2. Getting a criminal background check: This is essential to make sure that a prospective employee would be safe for an organization. The agency should check police records, and records maintained by state government to make sure that the employee was not convicted for any serious crime in his/her past. A speeding ticket received three years ago or one incident of drunken driving while in college can be easily dismissed. But a sexual assault charge or an embezzlement case filed against an employee is a sign of serious trouble. The name of the employee should be struck off the roster on the spot.
3. Running a credit report analysis : The credit report of an employee should be observed carefully. It’s alright if an employee took a loan in the past and is still paying the EMI for it, but he has skipped repayment of loan repeatedly, or has filed bankruptcy multiple times, then the employer should have second thoughts about hiring the employee.

These are the criteria that a prospective employer should focus on when hiring an agency to do the screening. It is important to communicate to the people of the screening agency that the employer is most concerned about these bits of information. This will help determine whether an employee is truthful about his/her past and is of the reliable sort.