Hiring the wrong person can prove a very costly decision for your business. It can be damaging to your business reputation as you may be liable for negligent hiring if this employee gets involved in criminal behavior after you have hired them. Criminal background checks are thus an essential part of your hiring strategy to protect your business from anything untoward. You need to do a background check on all potential employees to ensure you are hiring the right person.
What is a Background Check?
A criminal background check is a comprehensive review of your potential employee’s history. It contains records such as education history, credit history, employment history, license records, and most importantly criminal records.
It is important to note that the information received while conducting a background check cannot be used as an excuse to discriminate in any way. Discrimination using a background check can include a decision based on national origin, sex, religion, disability, genetic information, and age.
Avoid Liability
By performing a background check on your potential employees, you reduce the chance of hiring someone with a history that could jeopardise your business image as well as cause actual losses within your company. Imagine you find that there are financial discrepancies within your company, and then you find out that the employee has a history of financial malfeasance (fraud, theft or embezzlement), although you may be able to remedy this criminal activity, it could have been entirely avoided in the first place.
In other cases, you may be held liable due to your negligence to perform a background check. Imagine that you are hiring a company driver and that this driver gets into a terrible accident while under the influence. If the driver is arrested and the police see that he already has previous DUIs, then it is your lack of due diligence that allowed him back on the roads. The courts insist that employers must utilize reasonable care when hiring people that may present a threat to the public.
Workplace Safety
Workplace safety is incredibly important for your current employees. You want to ensure that your staff are taken care of and work in a productive, healthy and safe environment. So when conducting interviews, you need to be aware that potential employees could be dangerous. If you do not run a background check you run the risk of allowing a violent criminal or even a sexual predator into your company. This instantaneously compromises your workplace safety. A thorough background check will increase the safety in your workplace and also give you peace of mind that your employees are in a productive and safe space.
Improve Your Company’s Quality
When it comes to hiring new people, you want to ensure that you have the best candidates that are a good fit for your company. Applicants that are of a high quality will inadvertently increase your company’s success and in turn grow your profit margins. You want to be sure that the cost of your future employee produces a significant ROI. By working with a professional third-party screening firm, you can be sure that you are gaining accurate information on the criminal record of your potential employee. Ultimately, the screening process for employees can be a lengthy one, that requires a lot of time and effort, but you want to select the best possible candidate for your business and a comprehensive background check will ensure this.
The Bottom Line
When you are in the hiring process and vetting potential employees a background check is the easiest and most thorough way you can be sure that you are hiring the best candidate. Background checks help you gain peace of mind when hiring new people and they are also a way for you to ensure you are acting in a responsible and diligent way. So, unless you want to compromise your workplace safety, decrease your company’s value and go through a costly public relations effort, then you need to run a background check on each candidate – it’s the smartest decision for your company.
If you are looking for a reliable credit firm to partner with to give you comprehensive and accurate information, then look no further than MarisIT – protecting businesses since 2006.
