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Nowadays, it has become common for most employees to check the background of a certain candidate before hiring them. Background checking determines if the listed statements by the candidate correspond to reality. While this might be out of logic for some people, others see it as a necessity. This article provides some information about this process and several benefits it can have for the employees. Click here to find the best background checking services.
The Process
The first step of background checking is to understand if the provided personal information about the applicant is real, including their date of birth, Social Security number. In other words, the first step is about verifying their identity. After finishing this part, the employee might dig deeper into some areas such as:
- Education Background: Find the accuracy of the attended university/school mentioned in the resume.
- Criminal History: this is about checking if the applicant has ever been imprisoned, is on probation, etc.
- Career History involves checking the candidate’s previous jobs, how long they were employed, and other details.
- Credit Check: find out if the applicant is financially responsible and is not blacklisted from banks.
- Social Media Checks: because employers know that most people express their opinions and interests on social media feeds, they usually check the person’s social media accounts to have a better understanding of their character.
Although the employer should consider some restrictions when searching for background information of the applicant, the law finds this action legal, and no employee can complain about it (unless it is the case of restrictions).
Moving Forward to the Benefits:
Safety
It was found that checking the candidate’s background increases the level of safety in workplaces. Nowadays, in order just to get some information, some people can fake their resumes to get hired by a certain company. These so-called thieves can pose a serious threat to the success and further activities of the company. In some cases, the staff of the company and their lives would also be at risk. As a pattern, if the applicant is a potential criminal and was even imprisoned in the past, then his freedom and presence in that working environment will seriously affect the company. It is mainly the employer’s obligation to set a warm environment at work, so conducting a background check will be beneficial both for the workers and him.
Qualified employees
Every person can tell how great he/she is, overestimate their abilities, but those words would mean nothing if there is no proof of that. So if the company does not want to end up hiring unqualified candidates, they should conduct a proper background check of the person’s past employment history. Previous experiences can tell a lot about a person’s skills and productivity level. What is more, hiring the wrong person will be costly and time-consuming and can promote other unpleasant side effects in the future.
Cost and timing
If the company fails to hire the right candidate for the first time, then the turnover rate of employees will rise, which will lead to an increase in costs. In most cases, new employees are going to have training sessions, which, indeed, costs some money. Besides the costs, all this training will take some time, so it would be better to find some time and check the applicant’s background than later waste additional money and time.
The Reputation of the company
In most cases, these employers will interact with other companies’ workers, too, and if they do not behave accordingly, the company’s Reputation will decrease. Hence, when hiring a new employee, one should also consider their personality traits and working skills, as they become the company’s ” face. ”
Job Application Quality
Conducting a background check on the applicants will lead to having better quality job applications. A lot of companies stated this because they noticed many improvements in applications. When the applicants know about this requirement, they take everything more seriously. Also, the rate of dishonest people or the ones who want to hide something from the employer would decrease after knowing this requirement.
Summing up, doing a background check when hiring a new employee is essential for all organizations, and they help the company to have more suitable workers, a better and safe working environment, not waste money and time on training the “wrong” employers and will undoubtedly impact the company’s reputation and the job applications in general.
