It’s an all too common
fact that many companies fail to carry out background checks on
potential employees. Even those that do manage to carry out some form
of checking fail to do it properly. With this in mind, here are the
top facts that small to medium sized companies fail to bring up when
doing background checks and why.
Failing to get to
the bottom of a name
Ah yes, what’s in a
name? I hear you ask…well lots. Plenty of people use a nickname or
a shortened version of their name eg, Mike instead of Michael and Liz
instead of Elizabeth. While it isn’t an obvious issue, have you
considered that it could be used to prevent someone digging too
deeply into a past?
As an example a
potential employee might have a driving license under the name of
Mike Jones. So you do the obvious thing and use this information to
search for any past criminal activity. However Mr Jones may have had
a past license under Michael Jones or Michael A Jones, or even Mike A
Jones. As far are as the courts are concerned, that’s four different
people, not one. As you can imagine it’s relatively easy to hide a
past misdemeanour this way. To avoid this issue, run a social
security trace. While for whatever reason names change throughout the
years, social security numbers remain intact.
Not calling former
employers
One of the main areas
on a CV is left for former employment. This is so that future
employees can see what they’ve been doing and whether they’re
qualified to take on the role they’ve actually applied for. The issue
is that because it’s so standard many companies will take what the
candidate has written at face value.
Did you know for
example that according to the Wall Street Journal, 34% of all CV’s
submitted for job application contain outright lies?
Many times applicants
will falsify small parts of their background in order to raise fewer
questions and/or to make their application more appealing. One
courtesy call to the former employer will either verify or disprove
any application statements. While former employers don’t have to
divulge why an employee left, they should at least provide basic job
title and date information. This is usually all you need to make an
informed judgement call.
The truth is that
failure to carry out background checks is one of the main reasons
that employers are targeted by employee theft. There are obviously
other deterrents that you can take to prevent theft, such as hiring a
security company, but by carefully screening your employees before
you take them on, you know that you have good solid people with a
good solid reputation.
Here at MA Security
while we can’t run background checks on your employees we can and do
run them on ours. This means that when you hire us to carry out
corporate security, you can rest assured that you have the right
people for the job. To find out more, contact us today on 1300
020 406.
