Pre-employment Background Checks 5 Reasons Why Smbs Should Conduct Them

Labor experts tell us that 8 out of 10 hiring professionals do some form of pre-employment background screening. Yet many medium and small businesses and are still dependent on traditional methods of pre-employment background screening, such as checking up on references. This article explores why many SMBs avoid professional employment background checks, and the risks and dangers of doing so.

Why Many SMBs Don’t Do Pre-Employment Background Screening

Lack of concern. Some SMB managers believe that only cops, teachers, and doctors should be subject to employment background checks. That point of view is outdated. Nowadays, many private companies are consistently performing pre-employment background screening, for the reasons listed in the second half of this article.

Lack of Internal Support and Expert Knowledge. Many SMB leaders assume that any pre-employment background screening they do must be done in-house. The prospect of training an employee to carry out background checks is intimidating to most managers, especially since it could very well take a person months to research the best background check procedures. However, partnering with pre-employment background screening outsourcing firms allows all companies quick, convenient access to employment background checks.

Overestimation of Cost. Many SMB leaders hold a misconception about pre-employment background screening, namely that it’s exorbitantly expensive. If you’re open to the possibility of outsourcing your employment background checks, you can typically conduct pre-employment background screening for no more than $50 per job candidate.

Top 5 Reasons Why SMBs should Conduct Employment Background Checks

1. Decreased Costs. You’ll find better job candidates if you conduct pre-employment background screening. Improved hiring means that you’ll spend less money counteracting negative PR, lose less money to negligent hiring lawsuits, and see fewer employee-generated losses, such as embezzlement. Finally, it’s typically much less expensive to outsource employment background checks, rather than doing them in-house.

2. Fewer legal trip-ups. Each state has its own law in place regarding negligent hiring. These laws are intended to protect the public by preventing dangerous individuals from being hired for delicate positions. As an example, many states’ alcohol laws require that employees have three years of felony-free history before they can be hired for a job that involves serving alcohol. Failing to check out candidates backgrounds through pre-employment background screening opens you to the risk of being sued or fined for failing to do your due diligence on new hires.

3. Safer Employees. Human Resource gurus estimate that 1 out of 10 job applicants have a criminal history. If you don’t carry do employment background checks, it’s more likely that you’ll hire a dangerous individual who could hurt your employees, your customers, and your business’ reputation.

4. Accelerated hiring. The majority of pre-employment background screening companies offer results in 48 hours. In this sense, outsourcing employee background checks can mean speedier hiring. In just a day or two, you can get the information you need to determine if that seemingly perfect candidate has any skeletons lurking in his or her closet.

5. Discover dishonesty in applications. Here’s another scary HR statistic for you: researchers calculate that approximately 4 out of 10 resumes feature deceitful omissions, if not total lies. Employment background checks reveal such dishonesty so that you can avoid hiring mendacious individuals.

As we’ve seen, there are many reasons why owners of small and medium-sized businesses should arrange employee background checks.

Hiring A Professional Pre Employment Background Screening Company – Advantages For Human Resource

With increasing competition in job market, there is also an increase of fake credentials and forge documents provided by the candidates to get a higher position. These types of candidates not only deprive of the right of other candidate who have the original credentials, but also dangerous for the company itself. Therefore, the importance of pre employment background screening has been increasing with every single day.

Background screening of an employee is primarily a work of Human Resource department of a company. But most of the companies hire professional background screening companies to do the task for them. There are several good reasons for hiring a professional company. We will discuss few of them in little detail.

First and foremost reason for hiring a professional screening company is that, if a screening company is good, it will certainly have years of experience in employment verification, criminal background screening, educational document verification and so on. Hence, these companies can screen the background of a candidate far better than the in-house screening done by the human resource department.

Another good reason for hiring a professional background screening service provider is that they do it very fast. A first priority of any HR department is to complete the hiring process as quickly as possible. And if HR gets involve in screening of a candidate, the task may get slow because of other human resource related course. It can become a hassle for HR and for candidate both. So HR prefers to hire a background screening company do the process fast.

Furthermore, cost saving is one thing that make a company to hire screening company. If HR does it by itself, it will need in-house professionals to do the screening of candidates. Means company has to pay these professionals to do the screening, other costs are also involved. On the other hand, HR finds services of background screening companies cost effective. The reason of cost effectiveness is that these companies already have established networks; they are specialized in their work. They find no hassle in doing background screening of an employee anywhere in the world, and hence become cost effective.

Conclusion

Pre employment background screening is one most important task which no company wants to overlook. But this work needs specialization, and background screening companies usually have years of experience and are specialized in executing the task efficiently. Therefore, HR department should think about hiring a good background screening company before establishing an in-house section for screening of a job candidate.