6 Ways A Background Check Can Help Your Business!

            Background checks are one of the best ways to assess potential hires and business partnerships by going past the information provided by the subject to assess a variety of things, primarily regarding the honesty of disclosed information. As such, I've decided to put together a quick list of some of the expected benefits that running a background check or background check program can offer your organization:

        I.         HR Cost Savings: This is the big one. A frequent assessment of the cost of hiring then firing a bad hire uses a simple formula. Annual pay, plus admin costs (around 40% real and productivity costs) divided by 4. Even on a $30k annual salary, you can see the losses for a bad hire can be significant, particularly for an organization with thousands of employees, where productivity issues are most likely felt.

     II.          Verify Credentials: This is the other main component of background checks. This is done in order to verify credentials, professional memberships, past employment, etc. Beyond what HR staff will do however, a Private Investigator will ensure credentials are real when fraud or forged credentials are suspected.

   III.          Understand Past Performance: This involves not only going back to a former employer and conducting thorough searches with co-workers, clients and others who can give a better understanding of your potential hire. This is not feasible for all low level hires, however at the higher echelon, particularly in the C-suite, this function should be vital.

  IV.          Maintain Staff Quality: This field relates to some of the others, and allows for a comprehensive picture of the candidate to be created in the form of a profile, which can then be matched to your other successful staff to determine who is the best fit.

     V.         Limit Deception and Frauds: This involves focussed searches for things like made up or low quality "internet schools", bogus certifications and organizations, made up employment and other points of interest which need to be known. This also includes searches for criminality which may not be documented but can be detected for staff who will be entering sensitive positions and areas of responsibility.

  VI.          Buffer Against Corporate Espionage: This is for the larger companies who run the risk of corporate espionage. A good background search will offer a good buffer against it and hopefully reveal gaps in the legends and cover stories to enable your organization to resist infiltration through hiring programs.

            A background check is not for every company and organization. Sometimes the cost of running a comprehensive background screening program exceeds the mitigation value. However, I would definitely recommend that executive hires as a minimum are screened prior to being brought aboard. These positions have the greatest ability to hide their pasts, and have the greatest ability to damage your reputation if your gut was wrong in bringing them aboard.

Blog post is courtesy Elemental Investigations: Private Investigator Edmonton, an Edmonton, Canada based private investigator agency. They can be found online at www.elementalpi.ca