Essential Background Checks all Businesses Should Carry out Before Hiring New People
Being a Human Resources manager can be a very stressful job. You are often required to fill any vacancy promptly, but also make sure they are reliable workers who will prove an asset and not a liability to the company. How can you do that? Here are a few essential background checks you should carry out before deciding to bring in someone new.
Do a quick national police check
Over the past decade, many Australian businesses have included criminal history checks in their pre-employment screening, as this is the fastest tool to weed out bad hires.
Even asking a job applicant to submit to a background check can help recruiting agents to eliminate some unsavory characters. Rather than having to explain their criminal record, serial offenders will quietly withdraw their application and vanish.
On the other hand, looking at a candidate’s criminal record will allow a recruiting agent to understand what sort of person they’re dealing with.
Not all people with a criminal record are unemployable. There are many cases when it turns out that a job applicant was once arrested for a driving offence or was involved in a public disturbance fueled by a few too many beers. Such a singular offence on someone’s record can easily be explained. Trustworthy people will admit to having a certain offence on their record even before the results come in.
Criminal history checks can easily be carried out using the services of an online character check agency like Australian national character check (ANCC). Such agencies only ask for identity papers online and filling in the forms only takes a few minutes. The results are sent back via email, so there’s really no trouble for a busy HR manager.
Check educational credentials and employment history
A cursory look over a job applicant’s CV can give a recruiting agent a fairly good idea of that person’s background. However, a good HR professional should never rely on the candidate’s word. Anyone working in HR knows that people lie on their resumes. Or maybe it’s not an outright lie, but many people tend to embellish their resume.
Checking someone’s educational credentials can easily be done online as all you have to do is access a school or university’s database. If there’s a candidate with a fairly common name it might be a good idea to email that institution and ask for more details as you don’t want to hire the wrong Jack Smith who never went to that university.
The same goes for checking out a candidate’s employment history. A quick email to the HR department of a company they say they’ve worked for can easily verify that claim. Also, you might want to inquire about the reasons behind that termination, just to see if they were perhaps fired. If that is the case, do ask for details.
In most cases, the HR head of the other company will volunteer all the information they have. They understand your position and they know you might some day return that favour.
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