How Thorough Is Your National Background Check? 14 Jan 2019

Getting the right employees at the right time is essential to your company’s success and productivity. This time pressure means that it’s easy to cut corners and skip essential parts of an effective background check, such as running a national background check.

What Problems Can Making the Wrong Hire Create?

Hiring a person quickly might seem like a calculated risk, but one bad hire can lead to major headaches and cause extensive harm to your company:

• If you hire someone who just doesn’t have the skills you need for the job, customers won’t be happy and your employees will feel like they have to pick up the slack.
• The person could create a toxic culture and might even cause your company to lose clients you worked hard to acquire.
• If you’ve got intellectual property rights, you have to be on the lookout for those who want to steal your secrets.
• If your company operates in certain industries, you have to be extremely careful about background checks.
• You need to stay in compliance with industry and legal requirements, especially regarding citizenship, or you might face hefty fines.

Things could get far worse if somebody is truly committed to wrongdoing. If you have sensitive customer information, they might want to steal it, and you could face some pretty big consequences and lawsuits as the result of your lax approach to background checks. In its 2018 Identity Fraud Study, Javelin Strategy & Research revealed the astonishing fact that the number of identity fraud victims increased by eight percent – some 16.7 million U.S. consumers – a record high since the company began tracking identity fraud in 2003.

Not only is a bad hire bad for business and poison to company morale, but it could also mean some pretty serious dollars to you, too. In an article about shocking hiring statistics, HR.com reports that the U.S. Department of Labor found that the average cost of a bad hiring decision can equal 30% of the first year’s potential earnings. And that’s not even taking into consideration any potential lawsuits resulting from the bad hire’s activities or any possible negative hiring lawsuits you might face. The time, aggravation, and toll on your business could be heavy indeed.

What’s Included in Your National Background Check?

To avoid hiring a bad seed, you need to do a better job of hiring in the first place. You might say that you called a few references and even did a background check in your state, but that simply isn’t comprehensive enough. And don’t believe what you see on the resume either – with all the potential for identity theft, you have to be absolutely certain this person is who you think they are. If you don’t look at results on a national level, you might just be missing out on some very critical information.

In fact, your business needs to perform a thorough national background check that searches both nationwide and federal databases. Here’s the type of information that should be included in your research:

• Criminal background: Make sure your prospective employee doesn’t have a criminal background. Trusted Employees recommends using a multi-state database in conjunction with county/state/federal records based on the applicant’s residence history to get the best results.
• Identity verification: Don’t give an identity thief access to your private customer information or intellectual property.
• Sex offender registry: Any business dealing with children needs to perform a national check to look for potential sexual predators.
• Credential verification: Do more than just take the candidate’s word that they have the appropriate credentials for your industry.
• Citizenship: Be sure your prospective employee has a valid U.S. citizenship or is authorized to work in the United States.
• Credit History: If your employee will be trusted with company funds, you may want to run a background check for outstanding debt or bankruptcies.

Ready to Hire With Confidence?

Making the right hire the first time requires careful research. To learn where to start and get the right information, you need a trusted partner. Contact us to learn how we can help you hire with confidence.