When you’re first making the decision to add background screening into your decision making model, you have to really change your approach to decision making.
Instead of fast decisions, fast onboarding of people, whether it’s onboarding of people as an employee, onboarding of people from the standpoint of bringing them into your physical property as a visitor or as a tenant or a renter, or onboarding who are brought … providing volunteer services at your organization, any of that onboarding process needs to really slow down and it needs to be a process that is designed to insure that you as an organization obtain quality information that’s going to help you get facts and information and truth about the applicant who is … you are considering onboarding into your organization.
We’re really find that truth is a bridge to quality decision making and that smart decisions end up leading to sustainable successes for your organization. Background screening from the standpoint of our company is really a critical element to your overall success as an organization.
A survey was conducted in 2012 by the Society for Human Resource Managers to find out why people, and why companies actually conduct background screening. They discovered that about 87% of the companies were using background screening as a part of their onboarding process. Five main elements became identifiable and statistically significant: (For the complete explanation, go to: https://peoplefacts.com/news/five )
- Lower their risk of negligence claims
- Background screening creates safer and healthier workplace environments
- Fraud and theft are reduced in their organizations
- Complying with contractual or regulatory requirements
- Desire to assess the overall record of trustworthiness of candidates before they were onboarded.
First of all, companies said that they wanted to lower their risk of negligence claims and you can see on the PowerPoint if you are watching this as well as listening to it. That 52% of the companies said that that was one of their main reasons for conducting background screening.
Second of all, companies today know that by providing background screening as part of their onboarding process, they begin to establish a safe and healthy workplace or business place environment. Now it’s not just that you are bringing on better people to provide that environment but you start establishing a culture that says to the outside world, this is a company that takes seriously our safety, our healthy workplace and our healthy environment as a whole. We take it seriously enough to put in place at the beginning, from the start of our relationships, a process that’s designed to make sure that we are getting the information we need to make quality decisions. You really establish a culture of safety and healthy workplace environments in the mindset of your applicants, of people who come in contact with your business and with your ongoing and active employees or volunteers.
Third of all, companies who are conducting background screening said that they wanted to reduce the amount of fraud and theft in their organizations. Now a lot of companies think, “Well I’m not a retail organization, I don’t sell a product that people can really steal so why would I worry about that.” What we find out when you look at statistics today about fraud and theft in companies, most of that fraud and theft has little to do with the product and more to do with the business assets. That fraud and theft reduction becomes important for all sorts of companies from any industry and covering any sort of business model.
Fourth of all, we find that companies who were surveyed and were conducting background screening said that complying with contractual or regulatory requirements was the fourth most significant reason that they were conducting background screening.
Finally, there’s just a desire to assess the overall record of trustworthiness of candidates before they were on boarded. That was the fifth item that companies said that was significant to them in conducting background screening.
In a whole, as a summary, what we know is that when we’re entering into new relationships with businesses, other businesses or with individuals, whether we’re bringing them on as employees or tenants in our company or volunteers. We definitely want a trust what they are telling to us about their past, trust what they’re saying about who they are but we also want to verify that and that’s a part of what the background screening process does. It verifies that what they’re telling you is the truth. That what they’re telling you is whole picture, the whole story of their past, their experience, what they have accomplished and what they’ve done.
We also know that background screening is just one step in what should be a multi-step process of exercising your due diligence. When you put a background screening program in place, you are establishing that you are willing and able to exercise due diligence and that becomes defensible in a negligence claim.