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Friend or Foe: Only Your Employee Background Check Knows for Sure
Who can hurt your business more than your own employees? Who do you trust with your company funds, your valued assets and the best interest of your customers? Who do you pay a decent wage in return for some degree of loyalty and ethics? External theft can really hurt your business from criminal schemes and unethical treatment of your customers inside your business can kill you. You know that, right? After all this is your business! If you believe that your employees are not only your strongest asset but potentially your worst enemy, let me ask you another question: How well do you know them? Does your business engage in pre-employment screening? If not, you have a potential disaster waiting to land at your doorstep!
If you have never had an employee steal from you or put you in a bad light with one of your customers, you are fortunate and are likely to experience it at some point in time. During my career in law enforcement and loss prevention I have seen many unfortunate circumstances where an employer found himself asking why he didn’t know that the person working for him had stolen from other employers and had even been in jail for embezzlement.
If you had a policy of conducting employee background checks on all your candidates you would have known. Pre-employment screening is your best defense against a bad hiring decision. We have all made that decision to hire someone and found out that his resume was a lot stronger than he turned out to be. If we could have known about his proclivity to engage in unethical and illegal conduct, he may have never made our payroll.
Pre-employment screening arms you with the information to help you make hiring decisions. We have all heard the axiom that “the best indicator of future success is past performance.” An employee background check consisting of criminal records checks at the local, state and federal levels and a driver’s history check along with validation of application information and a possible credit history check for some positions can help you get a profile of the history of our prospective employee. Using your employee background check to your advantage you can now at least make an objective decision to accept the risk of the prospective employee or pass. I will tell you, based on experience, it is good to have a set of strong guidelines to help you adjudicate your employee background check decisions. You are less likely to expose yourself to liability and other problems if you make consistent decisions in regard to what disqualifies someone to work for you.
I will also give you some more advice from my experiences. Do not ignore the flags that present themselves during employee background checks. If there is a criminal history or he has stolen from another employee or he has been involved in fraud schemes, don’t think you are going to change him through your inspirational leadership. You might very well be able to; however, is it really worth it for you to take the risk? Are you willing to bet your business on him? I often asked managers when they told me they wanted to hire this person who was flagged with a history, “Would you let him babysit your child or take your keys and housesit?” Almost without fail the answer is, “No.” Then, why in the world would you feel good about letting him have keys to your store and access to your money and customers? Business is difficult enough with the untold number of unfortunate events and surprises that round every corner without allowing a predictable mistake to enter the picture.
So the next time you look at that prospective hire who you really liked and had the skill set you were looking at but unfortunately failed your pre-employment screening, see him as who he really is to you. He is a potential liability that could take down your business and reputation. Everyone deserves the right to work, but not everyone deserves the right to work for you and conducting employee background checks will help you ensure that your employees remain your greatest asset and not your worst liability.
For more information on employee background checks contact us: 1.770.426.0547 or www.backgroundcheckexperts.net
Who can hurt your business more than your own employees? Who do you trust with your company funds, your valued assets and the best interest of your customers? Who do you pay a decent wage in return for some degree of loyalty and ethics? External theft can really hurt your business from criminal schemes and unethical treatment of your customers inside your business can kill you. You know that, right? After all this is your business! If you believe that your employees are not only your strongest asset but potentially your worst enemy, let me ask you another question: How well do you know them? Does your business engage in pre-employment screening? If not, you have a potential disaster waiting to land at your doorstep!
If you have never had an employee steal from you or put you in a bad light with one of your customers, you are fortunate and are likely to experience it at some point in time. During my career in law enforcement and loss prevention I have seen many unfortunate circumstances where an employer found himself asking why he didn’t know that the person working for him had stolen from other employers and had even been in jail for embezzlement.
If you had a policy of conducting employee background checks on all your candidates you would have known. Pre-employment screening is your best defense against a bad hiring decision. We have all made that decision to hire someone and found out that his resume was a lot stronger than he turned out to be. If we could have known about his proclivity to engage in unethical and illegal conduct, he may have never made our payroll.
Pre-employment screening arms you with the information to help you make hiring decisions. We have all heard the axiom that “the best indicator of future success is past performance.” An employee background check consisting of criminal records checks at the local, state and federal levels and a driver’s history check along with validation of application information and a possible credit history check for some positions can help you get a profile of the history of our prospective employee. Using your employee background check to your advantage you can now at least make an objective decision to accept the risk of the prospective employee or pass. I will tell you, based on experience, it is good to have a set of strong guidelines to help you adjudicate your employee background check decisions. You are less likely to expose yourself to liability and other problems if you make consistent decisions in regard to what disqualifies someone to work for you.
I will also give you some more advice from my experiences. Do not ignore the flags that present themselves during employee background checks. If there is a criminal history or he has stolen from another employee or he has been involved in fraud schemes, don’t think you are going to change him through your inspirational leadership. You might very well be able to; however, is it really worth it for you to take the risk? Are you willing to bet your business on him? I often asked managers when they told me they wanted to hire this person who was flagged with a history, “Would you let him babysit your child or take your keys and housesit?” Almost without fail the answer is, “No.” Then, why in the world would you feel good about letting him have keys to your store and access to your money and customers? Business is difficult enough with the untold number of unfortunate events and surprises that round every corner without allowing a predictable mistake to enter the picture.
So the next time you look at that prospective hire who you really liked and had the skill set you were looking at but unfortunately failed your pre-employment screening, see him as who he really is to you. He is a potential liability that could take down your business and reputation. Everyone deserves the right to work, but not everyone deserves the right to work for you and conducting employee background checks will help you ensure that your employees remain your greatest asset and not your worst liability.
For more information on employee background checks contact us: 1.770.426.0547 or www.backgroundcheckexperts.net
