Points to Remember in Applying PreEmployment Screening www.affordablesearches.com
• The concept of pre- employment screening might seem excessive but in reality this is a prudent idea as one has to select only the quality personal instead of anyone with history of negligence during the work. Similarly the better practices like screening can reduce cost in many other areas including the employee retention and loyalty to the organization.
• One important aspect of the screening process is that it should be applied with due diligence and across the board. This should be done while keeping in mind the ideas of fair practice, which means there should be no invasion of privacy, and the information that should be taken in account should be either readily available in the public domains.
• The recruiting staff in the human resource department can conduct background research themselves. The easiest way to do this is to ask the candidate to provide some basic information about himself. The candidates may be asked to provide driving records. Driving records can also be obtained the authorization from the applicant. Educational records are also freely available, provided you have the authorization of the candidate. Information on criminal record, arrests, civil suits and judgments is public domain.
• No one is proud of being made redundant, let alone being dismissed, and this is why so many applicants will try to hide the real reasons they left their previous employer. It's one thing not to state on a CV reasons for leaving a post, but quite another to lie about this when asked. Even dismissal in itself is not always necessarily detrimental to a candidate's chances, but when one lies about it, it certainly raises questions about their character.
• And when it comes to stating current income, employees are increasingly taking advantage of the fact employers now provide less and less information on standard references. In fact, most will supply only dates of employment and job title. Therefore, employees allow themselves to inflate their salaries, thinking they will be able to get away with such lies.
• That is dangerous, because more often than not, the human resource people lack the capacity to deal with some of the important aspects of employee screening. Whereas the human resource people can competently verify academic credentials and past work history, they tend to show great weaknesses when they have to do things like criminal background checks: which usually involve more 'digging.' Ideally then, if pre employment screening has to be done inhouse, it should be done by an inter-departmental committee. Folks from the security department can do criminal record checks, whilst human resource folks do credential and work history verification, even as people seconded from the finance department do things like credit score checks and so on.