Finding the right people to hire for your business is not the easiest thing to do. Between all the resumes you have to read and the interviews to conduct, the hiring process can take a lot more work than you might think.
Not to mention the employee background checks you have to run and the onboarding process that happens before each new hire can actually get to work. While you may be familiar with the paperwork each hire needs to sign and the amount of training to plan for, you may not know as much about running a background check.
This is not something to overlook. Doing a background check now can save you a lot of time, money, and stress later.
Here are seven reasons this part of the hiring process is non-negotiable.
1. Verify Information
This is the most obvious benefit of running a background check. It helps you be sure of the information a candidate has written on their resume. Plus, a background check can shed light on any details you need to know that may not have been already disclosed.
Such details include anything from a criminal record to a person’s reason for leaving their last job. You may not think this information applies to the work your company does or the role which needs to be filled, but it does.
2. Get All the Facts
What if you run a background check on someone and realize they stole from their previous employer? Or that this person can’t pass a drug test for marijuana or other substances, or isn’t certified in all the things they claim to know about?
These are serious reasons to continue the search for your ideal new hire. The last thing you want to do is overlook the background check just to realize a rookie employee is causing you more trouble than you could even imagine. It’s better to know about a person’s bad tendencies now and make an educated hiring decision than to end up with an HR issue on your hands.
3. Save Time and Money
Maybe you’ve been burned by a bad hiring decision in the past. This person could have lasted a few days or a couple of weeks before you caught on to their poor choices.
Whatever the situation was, though, it put you back at the drawing board. When you don’t do a background check, you end up at the start of the hiring process all over again. This significantly increases the time and money you spend on searching, interviewing, and onboarding.
Such efforts could be much better spent investing in long-term employees and building your company as a whole. If you think about it, a background check now is money in your pocket and progressive improvements for your whole team later.
4. Maintain Employee Safety
It’s not just your pocket and schedule you have to protect. As a hiring manager or department head, it’s your job to maintain the safety of all employees already on your team.
Failing to run a background check could mean you allow a drug addict, violent person, or thief to interact with your employees. There’s no telling what could happen from this. You may end up with a report of physical or verbal harassment or office theft.
Before you know it, the “promising” new hire becomes one of the biggest problems you’ve had in a long time. They become a headache for you and a danger for others. You can prevent all of this with the background checks available on this website, though.
5. Protect Company Information
There’s the matter of keeping your employees safe and sound, and then there’s the matter of protecting your company information. This is especially important if you handle any kind of private information for your clients.
Such is the case for lawyers, doctors offices, and accounting firms. But, even retail businesses and customer support centers handle everything from credit card information to social security numbers and personal home addresses.
In terms of internal business details, you need to be careful with trademarked information, product development plans, and even your go-to marketing tricks. It’s better to operate on the side of caution than to give an unchecked new employee access to all kinds of information.
6. Uphold Compliance and Regulations
Speaking of information access, make sure you hire employees who are not only trustworthy but also properly trained and certified. Not everyone can take a person’s blood pressure or process insurance details for people who come through your door.
You need employees who have passed the specific tests and exams to do such things. Not to mention, their certification and licenses need to be up to date!
All this takes is a little bit of time to verify. But, it can save the integrity of your business and the overall safety of your clients to check now versus finding out the hard way.
7. Reduce Turnover
The thing about all the benefits mentioned above is that if you don’t do a background check, you’re going to have to fire a person who is guilty of theft or not able to comply with industry regulations.
This raises your turnover rate through the roof, which is more serious than you may think. A high turnover is a turn-off to the people who are actually good employees. The ones who can pass a background check and offer a significant amount of value to your business won’t want to do so if they notice employees are leaving the company all the time.
Plus, the higher your turnover, the more time you spend on onboarding and training rather than educating and promoting. For every person you let go, you become less able to lift up the employees who are willing (and able) to stay.
Should You Run Employee Background Checks on Current Employees?
Speaking of turnover, consider this: you should always be aiming to retain and support the best employees on your team. But, you may have to check in with their compliance and performance levels from time to time.
Employee background checks aren’t for new hires alone. You can do everything from random drug testing to performance analysis to make sure everyone on the team is on the same page.
Background checks prevent the not-so-good candidates from entering your business and help you weed out the best employees from the average ones once you have all open positions filled.
For more management and HR tips to help improve your business, click here.
