These materials are © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Any ... … · These materials are 2016 ohn Wile Sons td An dissemination distribution or unauthorized use is strictl prohibited

These materials are © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

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by Steve Kaelble

Background Checks

HireRight APAC Special Edition


Background Checks For Dummies®, HireRight APAC Special EditionPublished by

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Introduction

A talented team of employees can be the spark that makes a good company stellar. But any one of those employees

also has the potential to slam the brakes on that rise to greatness. You can’t run a company without people, so how can you increase your odds of hiring the best of the best?

A background check program is a way to gain confidence that the people you’re thinking about hiring really do have all the great qualifications they claim to have, and that there’s not some skeleton possibly lurking in a closet somewhere. Background checks can help to facilitate a safer workplace, staffed by qualified employees.

Background Checks For Dummies, HireRight Special Edition, establishes the benefits of background checks, explains how they work and what they can cover, offers some food for thought when setting up your organisation’s screening program and its policies, and helps to identify pitfalls that can derail a successful venture.

Foolish AssumptionsBecause this book caught your eye, I’m going to go out on a limb and make some assumptions about you, the reader:

✓ You are responsible for hiring at your organisation, per-haps as a hiring manager or a human resources recruiter.

✓ You feel like the hiring process is a bit of a leap of faith, and you’d like some help steering clear of potential hiring mistakes.

✓ You’re busy enough that you’d benefit from some assistance.


Icons Used in This BookCheck the margins of this book, and you’ll find some helpful icons. How are they helpful? They let you know the adjacent paragraph is making a key point.

Next to the Tip icon is a piece of advice that will help your program of background checks be successful.

Pay close attention to the paragraphs marked with the Remember icon — they’re extra‐important.

Hiring is important business, and the Warning icon alerts you to ways things might go awry if you’re not careful.

Beyond the BookThe information provided here is geared to a wide audience of readers. It’s important to remember that the laws and regulations governing screening vary from country to coun-try. Beyond that, certain industries such as transportation, healthcare, and energy (among others) may have regulatory screening requirements for employers that are not covered here. Only so much information can fit in this slim volume, so if you need more information on background checks, please visit www.hireright.com/apac.

Please also remember that this e‐book has been prepared for your reading pleasure and should not be considered legal advice. You should use the topics covered in this book to discuss your organisation’s screening requirements with your legal counsel.

Background Checks For Dummies, HireRight APAC Special Edition 2

http://www.hireright.com/apac


The Background on Employment

Background ChecksIn This Chapter

▶▶ Learning the basics of background checks

▶▶ Perusing the menu of screening services

▶▶ Understanding the need for background checks

▶▶ Realising who benefits

Y our organisation’s people are your most important resource. Excellent employees can make a good business

great. But less‐than‐stellar staffers can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. You’ve got performance management and review processes in place to track how employees are doing and help them improve, but the truth is, you’re best off if you completely avoid hiring those who may not be a good fit for your organisation.

This chapter outlines one way to help you achieve that goal: the employment background check. It spells out what a back-ground check is, what might be included in one, and why it can be incredibly valuable for your organisation.

Chapter 1



What Is an Employment Background Check?

This book focuses on employment background checks, but that’s a term that can cover a lot of ground. Numerous subsets of screening services may be included in an employ-ment background check. Which ones you choose will depend on a whole host of variables, including what kind of role you’re hiring for, where in the corporate hierarchy that role falls, and where you are in the hiring process.

Beyond that, all kinds of laws and regulations come into play, in some cases mandating some type of screening and in other cases prohibiting another kind of screening. These laws vary by country.

When you’re in the process of hiring and sorting through a group of potential candidates, you clearly want to be as thor-ough and careful as possible. But if your organisation is like most, you may not have the resources to dive deeply into each candidate’s background.

Fortunately, you’re not in this alone. You can hire a back-ground check company to handle the screening, allowing you to focus your attention on the other attributes of your job candidates. Pick the right company, and you’ll have a partner who not only knows how to get the screening done right, but also is quite familiar with the pertinent laws and regulations — whether you’re seeking to fill a job in your own location or on the other side of the world, where the customs and laws may be quite different.

What Are the Components of a Background Check

When you’re planning a background check, there’s quite a menu of services from which to choose. Here’s a sampling of that menu from which you’ll be choosing.

Chapter 1: The Background on Employment Background Checks 5


✓ Criminal record checks: If your potential hire has a criminal record, you would certainly like to know about it. That’s not to say that every crime is an automatic deal breaker; there are plenty of situations when a past crime is not applicable to a particular job, or enough time has passed to provide some comfort. Still, it’s good to know.

✓ Identity checks: Is your applicant really who he or she claims? That’s a pretty basic question that really goes to the heart of integrity. In this day and age of identity theft, it’s not crazy to be concerned about mistaken or stolen identities. An identity check may include verification of documents like government‐issued identification, pass-port information, and past addresses.

✓ Verifications: Your applicant has filled out a form or submitted a résumé. So, how do you know everything is accurate? A background check may include verifying educational degrees, professional licensure, employment history, and references.

✓ Employment eligibility verification: You may be legally required to verify a candidate’s citizenship or immigra-tion status. Anything involving government paperwork will take some expertise to sort through properly.

✓ Financial standing research: Depending on the role, you may want a picture of the candidate’s financial situation, through a credit check and a search for bankruptcy records or other adverse legal actions. Such screenings are especially common for employees in financial or high‐security positions, but they may or may not be allowed by law.

✓ Extended workforce screenings: Background checks aren’t just for regular employees. You may work with temporary employees or vendors, consultants, interns, and perhaps even volunteers. They may not be regular employees, but they’re part of the team, and potentially part of the risk equation, so they need screenings, too.

✓ Executive screenings: If you’re hiring for an upper‐level position, your screening needs will likely be more extensive and comprehensive because of the importance and influence of the role.



Why Do Employers Need Background Checks?

When you’re hiring, you expect to add an employee who is honest. Did you know that as many as one‐third of back-ground checks conducted by HireRight across the Asia Pacific region in 2014 and 2015 contained inaccuracies?

You expect that your employees will be trustworthy, always keeping the organisation’s best interests at heart — and not serving their own interests through theft or fraud. Whether employees are walking off with inventory or funneling company funds into their own accounts, theft is costly — sometimes devastatingly so. Did you know that roughly three of every ten business failures are caused by employee theft?

Also, when you go through the trouble of hiring someone, you expect that person to be qualified, skilled, and likely to stay on the job. After all, turnover is expensive — replacing a person can cost one‐third of that person’s annual salary, and sometimes quite a bit more. Yet the Harvard Business Review reports that four‐fifths of employee turnover is tied to bad hiring decisions.

Indeed, background checks play a key role in making better hiring decisions. The 2015 HireRight Employment Screening Benchmark Report found that 86 percent of employers reported coming across dishonest job applicants.

How do you think those employers found out about the fiction? Most often through background screenings. And though some of those fibs may have been discovered anyway, 72 percent of the respondents said screening uncovered red flags that otherwise never would’ve been noticed, at least not until something undesirable happened.

In that way, a system of background checks can improve the quality of the pool of potential hires. Ultimately, your goal in hiring is to sift through the candidates to find the best fit, and background checks will help you eliminate some of the less appropriate applicants.

Chapter 1: The Background on Employment Background Checks 7


In fact, in many cases, the less desirable candidates will eliminate themselves when they find out you’re doing background checks. There’s evidence that candidates with inappropriate backgrounds will sometimes deliberately focus their job search on those companies that they know are not conducting checks. When they find out you are, many of these undesirable applicants will steer clear of your company.

Then there’s the issue of workplace safety. When you’re going through the hiring process, you expect to assemble a team of employees who are rational, law‐abiding, well‐adjusted people. But the newspapers are filled with accounts of workplace violence in which an employee attacks a coworker, friend, or customer. These incidents often lead to lawsuits that result in devastatingly expensive awards.

Protecting workers from workplace dangers is clearly the right thing to do, but beyond that, it’s typically required by law. Many countries in Asia — including Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia — have workplace health and safety acts in place that require companies to establish safe and healthy work environments.

One more reason to consider background checks is less tangible but just as critical: your corporate reputation. It’s a matter of thinking the unthinkable. If your employee does something terrible — harming a customer or another employee through violence or drunk driving, stealing from customers, cutting corners in unethical ways — it’s likely to damage how potential customers view your company.

If your corporate reputation is tarnished, the cost of lost business could dwarf the actual damages of whatever incident caused the trouble. Sullied reputations have sent many companies to an early demise. Again, there’s no such thing as a crystal ball, but you need to do everything you can to minimise the risk of reputation damage.

Who Benefits from Background Checks?

The bottom line is, when they’re done properly, background checks help ensure the integrity, fairness, and consistency of



the hiring process. That’s good for those doing the hiring, of course, but it also benefits honest candidates who are playing by the rules and giving employers an accurate picture of themselves and their qualifications.

A well‐designed program of background screening ensures a level playing field for those who truly deserve to be in the game. It helps those doing the hiring to make their decisions in a more consistent manner, and that added level of fairness is a plus for candidates.

Also reaping the benefits of a screening program are existing employees. By proactively steering clear of candidates who at worst could be violent or at least might not be as qualified as they imply, those already on the payroll are safer, and also less likely to have to carry the load of a less‐than‐stellar hire.


How Background Checks Work

In This Chapter▶▶ Checking all the sources

▶▶ Finding the right background check for your situation

▶▶ Understanding the process and timeline

▶▶ Taking a global view

T hese days, vast amounts of information are at your fin-gertips, through Internet searches. The things you can

find out seem absolutely limitless. But that power can be a little bit misleading, because you still need to know where to look for information, how to gain the right kind of access, and how to interpret the volumes of data you can find. It’s not as simple as it might seem.

This chapter explores the complexity of background check-ing. It outlines the many sources of information that must be consulted to do the job right, and points out that your back-ground screening needs will vary quite a bit depending on your hiring situation. The chapter also details the process and the timeframe for completing background checks.

Drawing on Multiple Sources of Information

The process of checking out someone’s background looks pretty simple in the movies and on TV. Investigators plug

Chapter 2



a name into a database and retrieve a long list of relevant information about the person being checked — work history, criminal records, current and past addresses, financial details, names and addresses of relatives and significant others, records of cars owned, and so forth.

Of course, you can’t always expect to find reality on TV. The actual process of background checking is much more complicated, and probably wouldn’t make for scintillating entertainment. If background checks were as easy to conduct as it appears in dramatic depiction, there would be no need to enlist the help of specialists.

Here’s the reality: These are just a few of the many sources of information that may need to be consulted in a background check, depending on the role and the jurisdiction:

✓ Criminal records: If a candidate has a criminal past, it may show up in country‐level records, in a local jurisdiction, or perhaps in another country. Not surprisingly, a candidate with a history may prefer that you not find out, and may have moved around or taken other steps to obscure the past. There’s no single button you can push to find criminal history.

✓ Legal filings: Similarly, pertinent information related to civil actions or bankruptcy filings is stored in multiple places. Whoever is doing the background check needs to know where to look.

✓ Credit histories: Credit checks may or may not be appropriate, depending on the role, and they may or may not be allowed. But if this is part of the background check, it’s going to require multiple inquiries involving different sources.

✓ Educational institution records: Educational history is a common place where applicants may try to stretch the truth. Verifying the veracity of a candidate’s claims may require multiple inquiries from different institutions.

✓ Professional licenses and certification records: Professional licenses and certification for various occu-pations takes place everywhere from locally to inter-nationally, so it takes a lot of digging through various sources to verify an applicant’s claims in this area.

Chapter 2: How Background Checks Work 11


✓ Previous employers: Of course, it’s vital to know whether a candidate is being upfront when it comes to past places of employment, and there’s no single source of truth. Checking employment history typically involves making direct contact with those employers.

Will technology ever evolve to match the way background checking appears on TV and in the movies? More likely, that’ll continue to be dramatic license or science fiction. With data stored in so many places, in so many forms and formats, with so many security protocols and hoops to jump through to gain access, it’s likely to remain a complex business for quite some time. Fortunately for employers, background checking expertise is just a phone call, email, or mouse click away.

Recognizing That One Size Does Not Fit All

Consistency is important when conducting background checks, but that doesn’t mean there’s just one kind of back-ground check. Not at all. The list of factors that determines the type and scope of the background check is long.

To begin with, background checks vary tremendously by country. This has to do with both laws and customs. What’s legal in the United States may or may not be allowed in the United Kingdom or the United Arab Emirates. What society views as acceptable in Arizona may be taboo in Asia. And compliance requirements also vary from one country to another. It’s not just a matter of what’s allowed and what may be prohibited — certain kinds of screening are required by specific jurisdictions but not others.

You certainly need to be familiar with the requirements and restrictions in your home jurisdiction, and if you run a small, local company, that may be all that matters. That can be com-plicated enough. But if you operate offices in multiple states or countries, you’ll need expertise familiar with each area in which you’re operating.



Then there are variations with industry type. There are very specific types of information that are pertinent or even required when hiring for a job in finance, for instance.

Hiring for education may require searches of licensures and criminal histories, along with educational background. A check for financial services has a higher likelihood of delving into a candidate’s personal financial situation, for fairly obvious reasons.

Proportionality is another factor that keeps one size from fitting all. Simply put, not all jobs carry the same level of risk. The complexity of a background check is likely to increase in proportion to the risk associated with that particular role. An executive‐level screening will go into much greater depth in terms of cross‐referencing and analyzing the candidate’s experience. A front‐line employee won’t need nearly as detailed a check.

Another factor determining what goes into a background check is timing within the hiring process. Early in a process that has a lot of applicants, you may choose to screen for a few major red flags that would immediately disqualify a candidate. That’s a simpler, faster process, and one that has the benefit of culling the list.

Later in the process, when you’re down to the final handful of candidates, you may order a more detailed background check that delves much further into educational background or financial standing or whatever is pertinent to the role. It wouldn’t be feasible or affordable to do that kind of check on the initial hundred applicants, but it makes good sense later in the process.

Understanding the Background Check Process and Timeline

Just as there’s no “one‐size‐fits‐all” background check, there’s a wide variation in the timeline of the check depending on what you’re checking. Some aspects of the process can take longer, depending on individual circumstances and the coun-tries it is done in.



Here are some examples of the variations and how they might impact the timing:

✓ Identification check: This may take 24 to 48 hours to complete. It may involve checking the details on a passport or some kind of national ID card. A passport check compares codes built into the passport with the information provided by the candidate to ensure that it matches up.

✓ Credit check: A credit check may take 3 to 12 days to complete. It involves a search of records that are in the public domain and is designed to uncover evidence of adverse financial situations on the part of the candidate. This kind of check isn’t available in all Asian locations.

✓ Directorship search: If you’re checking into the back-ground of a potential board of directors member, a directorship search can also be done in a similar timeframe. It’s a matter of checking available information, and may or may not be offered, depending on the country.

✓ Employment verification: This kind of check can be more complicated and take longer. It involves contacting personnel or human resources departments at relevant past employers, and may also require verifying periods of self‐employment with the cooperation of a candidate’s accountant. Consequently, it could take 10 to 16 business days, especially if there are international jobs to check or if the checks involve financial regulators. It’s important to have a signed release form from the applicant, because some past employers won’t share information without it.

✓ Academic verification: Confirming the academic accom-plishments of a candidate typically involves contact with various schools and universities, which takes a bit of time — seven to ten business days for a typical report. If there are international educational listings on the appli-cant’s record, it could add a few more days to the time-frame. Most institutions will confirm when the candidate was a student and what degrees were earned, though some will require a release form before sharing that kind of information.



✓ Professional qualifications verification: Professional qualifications may include trade organisation member-ships, as well as certifications and licensure. It can take a week or so to complete this kind of work.

✓ Global watch list checks: If a candidate shows up on one of the world’s watch lists covering potential terrorists, known fraud practitioners, and people facing regulatory sanctions, you’d probably want to know. Fortunately, this kind of check can be done in as little as three to five days.

✓ Criminal checks: The timeframe varies significantly, depending on where you’re doing the hiring. In fact, the legality varies, too. It’s important to know the general areas where the candidate has lived, because that will help focus the search to areas where criminal trouble is most likely to have occurred. Many crimes may be recorded only locally.

How do you obtain a background check? It depends upon which background check specialist you choose, of course, but getting started can be as easy as logging into an online portal. When you’ve specified the services you want, your candidate often will be required to participate in the process as well, using the same portal to submit pertinent information for verification.

A background check company with an online portal should allow you to use the portal to track your in‐progress checks and ascertain their progress. When a check is complete, it’ll provide a report detailing the information uncovered, pointing out any discrepancies it has spotted between the information provided by the candidate and the data verified.

The details about a candidate that are included in a back-ground check report are quite specific and useful, but there’s also a general, overarching element that is often the most important bit of information of all: honesty. The background check will reveal just how honest and upfront the applicant was in answering questions on the application. Isn’t that one of the most important things you want to know about a candidate?



Remembering That the Process Varies from Place to Place

This point is mentioned in various places, but it’s worth highlighting right here and now: Cultural and legal differences around the world have a tremendous impact on background checks. Various screenings and other services are legal in some places and illegal in others. Certain checks are required in some places, optional in others, and forbidden in still others. And some cultures simply won’t accept certain background checking practices.

It is useful to seek expert advice, because a background screening specialist will have the legal and compliance knowl-edge to ensure your organisation abides by the relevant rules and regulations. In the business of background checking, one size definitely does not fit all.




Planning the Screening Policy and Process

In This Chapter▶▶ Writing your organisation’s policy

▶▶ Deciding the details about background checks

▶▶ Keeping candidates in the loop

▶▶ Complying with the law

B ackground checks are serious business, intended to uncover risks and prevent the inadvertent hiring of

people who may pose problems later. But they need to be con-ducted carefully, properly, fairly, and consistently. The only way to ensure that is to set up processes and draft policies.

This chapter explores the need for a policy on background checks, discusses what should go into such a policy, consid-ers what to tell candidates, and offers insights on the need to always stay within the law.

Setting a Policy on Background Checks

Consistency is an incredibly important word, when it comes to the business of employee and candidate screening. It’s vital to have a consistent approach, one that will be both effective and fair to everyone involved.

Chapter 3



You’ll need to write and follow a policy that spells out when screenings will be used and how results will be interpreted. Your policy should also make clear what you’ll do when a background check flags a candidate as being disqualified. In the absence of a written policy, it would be easy to inadvertently be inconsistent, which is not only unfair, but also legally unwise.

Your company is unique, so your policy will be, too. It doesn’t have to involve tons of research, but it will require careful thought about the jobs within your organisation and the risks associated with those jobs. Your policy may set forth different rules for different roles, because as Chapter 2 points out, one size does not fit all. And your policy will need to comply with the various local and national laws governing the use of screenings for employment purposes, so your legal counsel should be involved in the policymaking process.

Deciding When and Whom to Check, and for What

Your policy on background checks should be very specific in spelling out who gets checked and what information is covered. Will you be checking criminal histories, credit files, past employment, educational background?

Which of these areas you choose will depend on the following:

✓ The needs of your business

✓ The details of the position you’re hiring

✓ The relevancy of a particular check to the candidate’s ability to do the job

✓ What the applicable laws either require or prohibit

You’ll need to consider not only who to screen for what, but also when in the recruitment and hiring process to conduct the screening. When it comes to criminal records checks, it’s sometimes better to wait a bit.

Chapter 3: Planning the Screening Policy and Process 19


Holding off on the criminal records check until later in the hiring process allows you to get to know the candidate’s pluses before you’re exposed to a potential red flag that could be seen as potentially discriminatory. This gives even candidates with a criminal history the chance to be heard, the chance to make their case. In fact, some local laws forbid asking about criminal history on the job application, or perhaps until after the first interview.

The question of what to look for in a background check, and what to do with the information you learn, can be tricky. Consider criminal history. Do you automatically avoid each and every candidate who has ever been convicted of a crime? Not necessarily. Depending on where you’re hiring, you may even be legally required to conduct an individualised assessment of a candidate, and not just summarily reject someone with a record.

The truth is, your criteria for how to proceed will likely vary, depending on the job. There may be cases in which you would avoid hiring a cashier convicted of a crime in the past, but hiring an assembly line worker with that history may seem acceptable. There’s likely to be a difference between a delivery truck driver and a person you’ll be sending into a customer’s home.

As you make the determination, consider the nature and gravity of the offense, the nature of the job, and how long it has been since the crime was committed or the sentence was completed. Here’s where a written policy is really important, because even though the restrictions may vary, you should apply these variations with consistency. Some companies create a hiring matrix, which is essentially a chart that spells out when it’s okay to hire and when it isn’t, based on the nature and timing of the crime and the type of job being filled.

Another background check area that can be important — but also can be a source of trouble — is the credit check. As with other areas of focus, it’s vital to consider how relevant the applicant’s financial standing is with respect to the job role. Financial trouble could be a disqualifier for some roles, but not for others. And the time that has passed since negative information appeared on a credit report is worth considering, too. Keep in mind that credit checking is some-times prohibited, and even if it’s not, it still may require you to comply with credit reporting laws.



Your policy should spell out what types of roles demand a more comprehensive check. Generally speaking, the higher up the corporate structure, the broader the check. An executive‐level screening will cover a lot more than your basic criminal history, employment verification, and check of educational background. It may include personal interviews with refer-ences, a search through news media and social media to look for reputational red flags, and an examination of business affiliations and past dealings to gauge both competence and potential conflicts of interest.

And one more thing to consider in a policy manual: When might you need to do a screening or background check for an existing employee, as opposed to a potential new hire? Are there roles that need financial status reviews? Will you order a check in cases where there is probable cause to believe something is awry? What are the parameters that will cause you to act? Again, consistency is critical, which is why you’re writing the policy.

Communicating with CandidatesThe process of background checking may seem to have a secret‐agent feel to it, but you’re better off if it’s not a secret. It is good practice to keep potential candidates informed of what kinds of checks will take place, and in fact, such disclo-sure may be required by law.

Keeping candidates up to speed on the process also has a number of benefits. For one thing, as mentioned in Chapter 2, the phenomenon sometimes known as adverse selection may cause some potentially troublesome candidates to drop out of the process early on, saving you hassles later and improving the quality of the candidate pool.

Also, the process is often much smoother when you have the cooperation of the candidate. In many cases, the candidate is providing information that the background check verifies, and in others, candidate‐provided information will help the back-ground check vendor look in the right places for information.

Keeping candidates in the loop also helps them to understand what’s in it for them and how the process is conducted with

Chapter 3: Planning the Screening Policy and Process 21


fairness in mind. There’s comfort in knowing that an employer is dedicated to a safe workplace, one staffed by the most qualified people, and also in knowing that a recruitment pro-cess is less likely to be tainted by the presence of candidates who aren’t quite what they claim to be.

Last but certainly not least, candidate communications of one type or another are often required by law. Depending on the jurisdiction, an employer may be required to have a candidate give verbal or written permission to conduct certain kinds of checks and screenings. And if such checks turn up issues with the candidate, it’s often mandated that the candidate be informed of the problem and given the chance to correct erroneous information, make clarifications, and even make a case for himself or herself. In Asia, candidate cooperation is crucial, because additional consent forms or specific informa-tion and documents may be needed to comply with a check’s process requirements or client’s requirements.

Complying with the LawThe whole point of conducting background checks is to miti-gate risk — risk of violence or other safety issues, risk of theft or fraud, risk of unqualified employees, risk of reputation damage. But it’s vital to know the laws governing the process, or you’re liable to create new risks unintentionally.

First and foremost, you must ensure that your background check program is in compliance with all laws and regulations that are in force in all places where you’re conducting the checks and screenings. That’s no small feat, given the wide variations from one place to another.

The rules on discrimination and equal opportunity vary from country to country in Asia, but generally, they protect against discriminatory practices and advocate hiring candidates based on their skills and merits that are applicable to the job. To begin with, in most cases you can’t just decide you’re not going to hire anyone with a felony record. Any policies along those lines must be directly related to the specific job and the ability to do that job properly. In most cases, candidates must be individually assessed, not rejected by a bright‐line rule.




Getting Started With Background Checks

In This Chapter▶▶ Deciding whether to get help

▶▶ Choosing a vendor

▶▶ Preparing your candidates

▶▶ Keeping track of the process

B ackground checks may be vital, but they can seem a bit scary — and not just for the person being checked. It

seems like an ominous path on which to walk, one marked by hurdles and hazards. But not venturing down the path is pretty scary, too. The good news is, the way forward is a lot friendlier if you have a good guide who can shine some light on the path.

This chapter focuses on the first steps down that path, including determining whether you can handle the task internally, and how to pick a vendor if you choose to outsource. It details the ways in which you should prepare candidates for background checks, and spotlights an online model for tracking the process.

Determining Whether You Can Do This Yourself

You’ve probably concluded that conducting background checks is a complicated business. That is to say, it’s complicated for whoever is doing the checks, but it doesn’t have to be a hassle for you.

Chapter 4



Consider both resources and know‐how. Background checks can be time‐consuming, especially if you’re verifying employment and educational history, because that can entail one phone call after another after another, many of which require a lot of follow‐up. That has the potential to fill up the workdays of a lot of people.

But the question of know‐how is even more pertinent. Background checks are not just a matter of typing a name into your favorite search engine. This is a highly specialised skill. And knowing the processes and tricks is just the beginning — you also must know what’s allowed and what’s not.

Finding the Right VendorIf you’ve decided to engage a third‐party resource to provide background check solutions, your next step is to pick a vendor. Here are some things to consider and questions to ask of potential vendors:

✓ What’s available? Does the vendor offer options that are customisable to your needs?

✓ How broad are the choices? Will the same vendor be able to do both a quick identity check and an in‐depth, executive‐level analysis and verification?

✓ How many points are on the map? Does the potential vendor operate in all parts of the world where you have operations and are hiring? Is there local expertise covering each area, so you can be sure that your activities will comply with all local laws? Does the vendor have multilingual capabilities?

✓ How connected is the vendor? Are its systems integrated with those of criminal record bodies and credit check agencies?

✓ How fast is the turnaround? Will connected systems translate into speedy service? Will you receive timely word about adverse findings?

✓ Is data safe and sound? Does the vendor securely store candidates’ sensitive personal information, and have a safe way to transfer that information to you? Will the vendor purge data when finished with it, in compliance with applicable laws?

Chapter 4: Getting Started With Background Checks 25


✓ Is there ease of use? Will you be able to simply go online to order and manage your background checks? Is all the information you need instantly available?

✓ How’s the customer service? When online isn’t sufficient, is there a person you can easily reach for hands‐on care and assistance?

✓ How’s the bedside manner? Will the potential vendor treat candidates with care and respect?

Informing and Preparing Candidates for Screenings

The best way to attract and keep outstanding employees is to create an exceptional employee experience. That’s no secret. Just remember the importance of first impressions, whether you’re on a first date, making first contact with a potential client, or first getting to know a potential employee.

Candidates should be well informed and prepared for screenings and background checks. It’s a process, a sometimes complicated process, and it’s in everyone’s best interest if job candidates fully understand what’s going on.

Providing comprehensive information and being ready to answer candidates’ questions will help reduce anxiety — and let’s face it, even the most squeaky clean candidate may be a little uncomfortable with the thought of having someone comb through his or her personal information. It also helps candidates feel that they’re being treated fairly, and that’s important not only for that positive first impression, but also to ensure that candidates who don’t make the cut won’t feel like they’ve gotten a bad deal.

Background checks don’t have to be a totally passive activity for candidates. It’s possible for them to prepare, and it’s wise to help them do so. How can they prepare? Consider advising candidates to do the following:

✓ Ensure that their résumés are up‐to‐date, with full and accurate contact information.

✓ Get started on researching their own histories, including employment dates, job titles, and salaries, so it’s handy.



✓ Gather diplomas and transcripts backing up their educational experiences, and make files of tax forms and other supporting documents from past employers.

✓ Make lists of pertinent personal details, such as past addresses and current driver’s license numbers.

To help candidates prepare and understand the process, make sure they have access to a comprehensive set of frequently asked questions. Put it all in writing — on paper and online — and you’ll not only help your candidates feel better about the process, but also save yourself some time and trouble by proactively providing the answers.

Integrating with Applicant Tracking Systems

You need your hiring process to be as smooth and efficient as possible, and that includes the background check. That’s why you’ll love what a good applicant tracking system can do for you. Sure, screenings and checks create added steps in the recruitment and hiring process, but they don’t have to add a layer of inefficiency.

Your best bet is a secure, online tracking system that gives you full access to the work in progress, so you can initiate a request, check on the progress, and monitor the overall process. The online system should also give candidates tailored access, so they can submit personal information, upload supporting documentation, and add their online signatures to any required consent forms.

A good online system is, of course, totally secure. It not only provides real‐time status information, but also offers the ability to either view or download the complete, final reports. And the right applicant tracking system will be able to fully integrate with your own HR information systems and internal tracking applications.


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