Employee Screening

Employee screening is often misunderstood. People think that running a quick search of credentials through the normal hiring process is sufficient for all hires, despite the fact that most research finds that the majority of resumes and CVs contain falsities from minor to major.

The normal process of checking references on some of your potential hires is the thing that is relied on by potential hires who are fabricating their past. Even HR staff normally will go only so far as to ask a couple of questions to a "former employer" who may have nothing to do with actually ever having been the boss of someone.

While the lighter end of screening is not always a major concern, such as a Mc-Job hire, conducting the same level of scrutiny for professional organizations (which is what is occurring) can expose a company to many potential issues when hiring if the person is not legit. Poor performance, lack of training, mental health issues, criminality and opening up your organization to litigation are among the many risks associated to a bad choice in a hire.

A private investigator can help out with screening programs for sensitive personnel, particularly management and sensitive positions requiring specific knowledge. This includes things like executive hiring, scientific and technical trades, financial services and special access personnel, including things like night shift cleaners who often have free access to a building's interior while unsupervised.

Having a PI augment your internal HR services can be a relatively low cost option to running an internal program as it can be focussed on specific hires deemed at risk to fraudulent hires and allows you to not spend money on a full time in house investigator. Give a local PI a call to see how their screening services can help you.

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New Year Outlook

Well, its good to be back from the Christmas and New Year's holidays. We're a little late getting to our New Year's outlook on the coming year, but to be honest, entime off was well deserved. With that in mind, we want to highlight a few things we see as being large or continued stories in 2014 in the world of privacy, investigations and security. Let's see what will shape the landscape on those topics in the coming year:

• Snowden will continue to make waves as the government tries to reign him in. He is holding on to enough juicy tidbits to keep this ball rolling throughout the year. Importantly, the big internet companies will see more action in court as they try and distance themselves from the appearance of being in cahoots with the NSA, and may out out some new encryption standards which have been developed without the special sauce provided by the NSA. 
• Also related to Snowden, look to more operators offering "secure" online interactions. While interesting at the start, they will also lead to a greater level of attacks and sophistication in exploiting perceived protections. Think of Snapchat and Lavabit for those who know.
• On the security front as a whole, we will continue to see the sad march to automation and new standards designed to save mid-level managers the discomfort of taking 4 seconds to secure information. Federal Govenment et al, will see more major blunders as a result.
• On the economy, a stronger economic footing will allow us to enjoy reduced employee based crime as wages and stability help calm the masses. That being said, on the fraud front, managers will be granted relaxed fiscal controls, which will inevitably lead to something about hands and cookie jars. Also on this front, better economic conditions usually also lead to lessened rates of family violence and drug abuse. 
• The investigations industry on the whole in Canada will strengthen we think. This will be due to economic factors which will allow business to tackle problems requiring outside help and the easing of purse strings will help outside of Canada. The push in jurisdicitons such as the UK and the US will also continue towards more regulation of the industry in terms of licencing and basic standards, which should be good news for local investigators and those of us trying to  contract investigators in those countries for assistance with cases elsewhere.

That about does it for our outlook. We definitely are looking forward to 2014 and the new and exciting challenges it will bring. We wish all a happy and prosperous new year!

Blogging provided by Elemental Investigations: Private Investigator Edmonton, a Canadian Private investigations and security consulting agency.