Importance of Employee Verification and Background Checks

Organisations should not think that conducting a background check on a prospective candidate is a sign of mistrust or invading the candidate’s privacy. In fact, conducting employee verification during the initial stages of interview will protect your organisation and ensure that you do not end up hiring employees that are untrustworthy or risky for your organisation and its reputation.

Reasons to Conduct Employee Background Checks

Research reveals that many job applicants tend to make up details on their resumes to look better in a highly competitive job market. They can misrepresent their experience and educational qualifications. If you end up hiring such an individual, it will be a waste of time, money, and effort, as you will not be able to hire the right professional for the job role.

By conducting employee verification at the pre-employment stage, you get all the details about an applicant’s past, including their previous jobs, experience, skills, and educational qualifications. This enables you to see whether it is worthwhile to proceed to the next stage, which is hiring the individual.

Who Conducts the Verification?

There are professional organisations that carry out discreet verifications of employees, starting from their resume. This allows you to eliminate candidates with a negative past and you need not worry about how their work ethics can negatively impact your organisation, clients, and other employees.

Professional employee verification companies conduct their investigations to verify a candidate’s employment history, dates of employment, salary, and responsibilities at previous jobs. In addition, the verification can be extended to the candidate’s education history and certifications that they may have acquired along the way.

Today, thanks to social networking sites, it is easy for many professional organisations to check a job candidate’s social networking profile to ensure that they do not have objectionable content or images posted on their profile pages that are not in line with an organisation’s values and culture.

If you haven’t thought of performing pre-employment verifications for candidates, you are missing out on the benefits of this verification. In the long run, it helps reduce the overall costs of hiring and also limits attrition by allowing you to employ just those professionals who are qualified and do not pose a risk to your brand or reputation.

4 Important Aspects of Business Due Diligence

Business investments, partnerships, or alliances should only be done after obtaining all the information related to the business you want to invest in or have an alliance with. This is called business due diligence. It is done to mitigate the risks by allowing businesses to know all the essential details required regarding an organization. However, because of its complicated nature, there are several aspects of it.

1. Investment Risk Due Diligence

What separates a professional investor from a novice is that the former knows everything about the investment and the risks involved whereas latter lacks the adequate knowledge and experience. This difference is defined by Investment Risk Due Diligence. It is imperative for the investor to know about the organization before investing in it. Investment risk due diligence reveals a structure of how the organization is expected to grow in the following years and what are the risks involved.

2. Vendor Due Diligence

Operations of businesses cannot work without vendors. Businesses and vendors work in collaboration for both of their growth, on industrial level. Therefore, if a business is looking for a new vendor to collaborate with, it is important for the business to know everything about it before making a deal. This will help the business ensure whether or not the vendor can be trusted.

3. Franchise Due Diligence

Franchising is one of the great ways for businesses to expand. Different businessmen and organizations buy the franchisee for their growth. However, franchising has several unavoidable risks involved for the business. Franchise due diligence helps the businesses in screening the potential franchisees.

4. Distributor Due Diligence

Every business has alliances several organizations, called Distributors, which form the supply chain, and help in delivering the products to the market from where customers can buy them. Therefore, it is important that supply chain is maintained. If it is broken in any way, it can directly affect the business. Distributor due diligence helps the businesses know the distributor’s capability and how it can be utilized to maintain the supply chain.

As a result of Business due diligence, businesses know everything about an organization before deliberating on the final decision. In other words, business due diligence helps in mitigating risks involved in business alliances.

3 Reasons to Conduct a Background Check on Job Applicants

Today, it has become a necessity to do background verification on the job applicants. Many applicants are writing false information on their CV to make them seem a better candidate than others. The brunt of this is faced by businesses as they realize later that the employee does not have the said knowledge or capability as was deduced from their CV at the time of interview. Therefore, it is vital to do background verification as it helps businesses in the following ways:

1. Hire the Right Employees

The first reason to do background verification is to hire the right employees. This greatly increases the quality of the applicants. This prevents businesses from hiring applicants who exaggerate or provide false information on their CV. Thus, in order to bring the right talent on board, businesses seek help from  background verification companies, spread throughout India. You can hire a background verification company in Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, or any other city, to help you increase the quality of hires.

2. Reduce Workplace Disturbance

Employees are the strength of organization. The growth of several businesses hinders because of the disturbance caused by certain employees. It could be because of their behavior, inability to work with as a team player, being short tempered, etc. The role of a background verification company is to ensure that you are hiring the best employee for your business who will work towards the growth of the company.

3. Reduce Employee Turnover

Businesses spend significant amount of money to hire right employees. Thus, the last thing they want is their employee to resign for another company, perhaps one of their competitors. The background verification company helps you hire people who want to stay longer and work for your organization. This promises that the company can invest on their training and turn them into an asset.

For instance, if you hire a background verification company in Gurgaon, or any other region of NCR, do not assume that the company will only verify the applicant’s tenure in this city. Instead, whichever the company they have worked in, regardless of the city, it would be verified and a full report will be given to you for making the final decision.

The Importance of Background Checks for Companies

The phrase “do not judge a book by its cover” stands as true in businesses, as it does in other walks of life. In order to select the most appropriate candidates out there for the vacancies within the organization, recruiters must probe deeper than the face value.

A report by AuthBridge states that 1 in every 6 candidates faked information on their resume to bag a lucrative job in 2017. This calls for extensive background verification before you hire

Background checks, enabled by Technology, can be the most efficient tool in helping them achieve this cause.

Background verification refers to the procedure of assessing the credentials of new recruits before they get hired for a job in a company. Many corporate organizations in the recent times have been conducting background checks to find the right employee, often aided by background verification companies in India.

Initially, the system of verifying backgrounds was undertaken in countries like Europe and United States. It helped them detect fake employee profiles and also see if the recruit was the right candidate for the job. Now, with the changing scenarios of the business world, more and more companies across the globe, including India, are opting for these prudent measures, before recruiting employees.

Why is background verification so important?

With every passing year, the job market is getting even more competitive. Naturally, any candidate appearing for a job interview would want to seem like the best fit for the position. And to achieve that and to gain the attention of the recruiters, they might also be more than ready to hide some parts or exaggerate others in their profile. Thus, thorough background verification seems required for companies, now more than ever.

Although for a seasoned recruiter, telling certain made up aspects from the real ones can be easy, there are other facets that might be tricky, even for them.  Background verifications generally test the recruits on these grounds –

• Educational assessment and work history
• Drug-tests
• Criminal background checks
• Address verification

& more…

This is information that every company today deserves to learn about a candidate before they commit to a legal association with them. They must ensure that the candidate has nothing in the past that can affect the company or other employees, negatively.

Other than this, background verification also assists the recruiters in selecting appropriate candidates every time, and also helps limit any problems from occurring in the future. This also enables recruiters to represent these candidates within their company, since they now know them.

Among the methods out there for carrying out such assessments, popular ones are, background screening software and tools, and third-party background verification companies in India.

Background verifications are no more mere options for organizations, they are necessities that all companies, big or small, must adhere to, for their own safety and progress.

3 Steps to Conduct a Background Check on an Employee

Owing to the fact that a company spends a significant amount of time and efforts in the recruitment process, it is crucial for them to hire candidates who are the right fit for the job. And therefore, in the process of creating employment opportunities, they also avail employee screening services to ensure that they are hiring the right candidate for the job.

Here’s a look at the following 3 steps to conduct an employee background check: -

Conduct checks before hiring them

The best time for conducting an employee screening is after offering the job and prior to on-boarding the candidates. Employee background screening ensures that the selected candidates have no criminal backgrounds, and all the information provided by them, such as their educational qualification, previous employment details, and other crucial information are authentic. An organization can also conduct employee screening during an employee’s tenure if it suspects insider threats/ suspicious activity from the employees during their tenure.

Ask for the consent of the selected candidates

Before conducting the employee screening, it is essential to ask for the selected candidate’s consent for the same. In case of conducting employee screening without getting the consent of the selected candidate, the candidate can take the organization to the court. Many companies which offer employee screening services, also provide online consent forms for the selected candidates to fill, in order to prevent inconveniences.

Conduct background screening according to the job profile

In order to ensure that you are not wasting any time, effort, and money in employee screening, you are suggested to include key checks in the employee screening according to the job profile of the selected candidates. For instance, if you are hiring a candidate for the post of an accountant, it would not be sensible to check his driving record background. Nevertheless, including a credit check to check if the candidate has a sense of financial responsibility and is good at taking care of personal finances id a wise thing to do during background verification. 

Conducting an employee screening test will ensure that you are hiring right candidates for your organization, and with the help of aforementioned  steps, you can conduct employee screening much more methodically!