Pre-employment screening is a process that helps you identify candidates who will make good employees and fit into your company’s environment. It can be used with any type of business, and it’s worth considering if your company needs to hire more employees or if you’re looking for a new hire. It is a great way to find the best candidates for any position.
However, it’s mainly used to separate out those candidates who will be a good fit from those who won’t work out or aren’t right for your business culture or values. You can save time and money by eliminating unqualified hires before they even start working for you, and here are 7 reasons why you should start.
Find the Right Employees
By conducting pre-employment screening of potential employees, you can increase the number of high-quality job applicants. With a pre-employment screening, you will have:
- Fewer misstatements and discrepancies in job applications.
- People trying to hide serious issues will be discouraged from submitting their applications.
- People looking for a safe workspace will be encouraged to apply.
With these, you will have a high-quality applicant pool and an opportunity to hire better candidates.
Protect Your Business
Pre-employment screenings can help protect your business from hiring employees who might cause problems. This is one of the most common reasons employers use pre-employment screening for their businesses. A thorough background check will reveal any criminal activity on an applicant’s record, including arrests and convictions if any are present.
It’s important to identify red flags to weed out applicants convicted of crimes or who have a history of drug use, which could lead to workplace issues. Pre-screening will help you detect misleading documents or fake identities regarding the job applicant’s proposal. This doesn’t mean you avoid hiring anyone with prior legal issues. It is simply a way to understand the background of a candidate completely.
Ensure Regulatory Compliance
Compliance is among the most important parts of pre-employment background screening. There are certain laws that you must know about that ensure that your pre-employment screening provider complies with them:
- Background screening records must be preserved for a maximum period of 7 years or 10 years in the case of bankruptcy. After this, the record won’t be considered legitimate, and any action made using these records will be illicit.
- When it comes to pre-employment screening, there are certain restrictions on issues of sex, disability, race, age, or religion. You cannot ask for background information of a candidate only because they belong to a certain race.
- California doesn’t allow you to demand a criminal record check before making an employment proposition to a candidate, except when you work in an industry that requires you to work with the kids.
With the help of a pre-employment screening provider, you can make sure your screening fulfills the industry standards and federal, state, and local regulatory requirements. Without it, you might face legal damages, costly fines, and loss of privileges.
Save Money
Pre-employment screenings help you save money in a wide range of ways, including:
- Reducing your turnover rate: The less time and money it takes to find new employees, the more time and money you can spend on other things in your business. You’re also less likely to lose good employees when they leave because they know what’s expected of them before they start working at your company.
- Reducing treatment costs: If an employee is injured at work, this could lead to costly medical bills for both the employer and employee, especially if no pre-employment screening was done beforehand. If a client suffers from an injury while using one of our services or products—such as negligence during construction—you might find yourself at the other end of a lawsuit. Pre-employment screening can ensure that the candidates are accurate about their previous job experiences and help you avoid these costs.
- Reducing training costs: Training new hires can be expensive, especially if done incorrectly. However, once you’ve done your due diligence during hiring processes regarding their work experience by conducting thorough background checks on each candidate, you won’t be spending much time or money training them. The pre-employment screening would have already proven their proficiency level in whatever skill sets you to require them to perform within your organization.
Streamline the Hiring Process
A pre-employment screening process will help you quickly and efficiently find the right people. It will shorten your applicant pool and save you a lot of time. You’ll be able to eliminate those who don’t meet your standards, saving yourself time and effort in interviews, reference checks and more. You will also be able to root out candidates who lied on their resume about their job experience and save yourself the time and resources you would otherwise spend interviewing them.
You’ll be able to focus on finding only those people who are qualified for a role in your company. You won’t have to worry about wasting valuable time interviewing each candidate until they turn out not to be right for your business.
Increase Your Legal Defensibility
As mentioned earlier, you can reach out to a pre-employment screening provider to conduct various checks and verifications. This can serve as evidence and proof in any lawsuit or legal liability in the future. For example, if someone sues your company and claims they were not hired due to race or gender discrimination, the screening results can be used as evidence in court proceedings.
Also, negligent hiring can leave you liable for the action of your employees. So, when an accident occurs that could have been prevented if you had known about your employee’s past, you might end up with a lawsuit. It can also cause irreparable damage to your company’s reputation.
Create a Productive and Safe Workplace
If you hire an unfit employee, it can lead to severe mishaps. By administering background checks, you can eliminate candidates who might threaten your company’s values and culture and reduce workplace violence.
Pre-employment screening provides comprehensive screening of candidates’ records and outlines critical behavioral habits that might become a threat to your company in the future. Also, if your employees feel safe in the workplace, their productivity will increase, achieving the organizational goals.
It’s important to be proactive about your hiring practices. Hiring the wrong person can cause a lot of damage to your company and take time away from other tasks you should be focusing on.
So if you want to avoid these situations, don’t wait until they happen!
It’s better to spend some extra time up front screening candidates and finding the right fit for your business than dealing with an inexperienced employee or someone who isn’t a good fit for your organization. By running a thorough pre-employment screening process, your company will save money, time and resources on waste management later down the road.