Your employees are the heart and soul of your company, and you’re going to need them if you want to grow a successful business. When you have good employees, you’ll be able to boost your profits and dazzle your customers or clients. Conversely, bad employees will hamper the workflow and efficiency of your workflow, and they could even drive away sales.
It’s important that you always screen new employees during the hiring process. Employment screening can help you weed out bad employees before they every join your company. Here are 5 key benefits to pre-employment screening.
1. To Protect Your Employees
Arguably the most important thing about an employment screening is that you can find out whether or not a prospective employee has a criminal record. There might be some legal histories that aren’t concerning or relevant, like traffic violations (unless you’re running a transportation service). If there’s a smaller offence that concerns you, you could ask the prospective employee about it. Their response could give you more context about that event and the job candidate’s behavior.
If a prospective employee has a history of violent crimes, you should move on to a different candidate. You don’t want a violent offender in the workplace—your employees may find out and feel uncomfortable, or, in the worst-case scenario, that person commits violence against your employees. That would be harmful to your business and could cause others to question your judgment.
2. To Protect Your Customers
Employment screening will also help protect your customers or clients. This is especially relevant for any kind of customer service or hospitality-based workplace, like independent retail stores or restaurants. If your employees have a lengthy criminal history, there’s always the chance that they’ll repeat their prior behavior while they’re on the job.
Every employer fears having an employee who lashes out or acts inappropriately towards customers, or who behaves unprofessionally while customers are around. That kind of behavior may cause you to give a refund to the customer, and you might permanently lose their business.
3. To Protect Your Business Finances
When you run an employment screening on a job candidate, you can also run a credit check for new hires. A credit check will give you the candidate’s credit score.
A credit check is unnecessary for most of your employees, but you might want to run a credit check on candidates who are vying for a major financial position within your company that involves saving or investing, like accounting or business development. It’s important for those candidates to be fiscally responsible; if they don’t have a handle on their own finances, how can you trust them to be with your company’s finances?
A credit check might also be important if you’re hiring for any business that’s involved in financial planning. If you’re trying to hire true financial experts, you’ll only want to hire candidates who have good credit scores.
4. To Defend Against Competition
In local markets where competition is fierce, it’s not unheard of for a competing business to have one of its employees apply for a job at a competitor. These “spies” can infiltrate your workplace and steal valuable information from you. Sometimes, these employees will go by a fake name, and other times they’ll just pretend they’re not currently employed.
Employment screenings can root out these competitors. First, a background check can reveal whether or not someone is using a fake identity. Second, a background check may reveal any companies that a job candidate has reported working at. Employment screenings are an easy way to weed out dirty schemes by competitors.
5. To Make Sure They’re Qualified
As previously mentioned, you can use an employment screening to make sure that a candidate has actually worked where they say they’ve worked. Your business could suffer huge productivity and money leaks if you hire an underqualified person who has lied about their prior work experience. Employment screenings will help you verify the validity of the work experience your job candidate has listed on their resume.
Cross check the results of the employment screening with a networking site like LinkedIn. Although the background check may reveal that your candidate does truly have the work experience they claim, they should also be connected with very colleagues that would be willing to vouch for their abilities.
As you can see, a pre-employment screening can protect your employees and your company’s profits. Be sure to make it a standard part of your hiring process.
