Screening across subsidiary businesses

When your business grows to the point where it owns subsidiary businesses – either at home or abroad – there’s every chance that recruitment may be handled very differently from one business to the next. The resulting patchwork of policies and processes could be inefficient, costly and, potentially, unfair. When experienced at a group level, the potential impact of this inconsistency can be exponentially more damaging.

The three critical considerations when considering recruitment and background screening across a corporate family are:

  1. Consistency
  2. Fairness
  3. Legality

Fairness and consistency go hand-in-hand. In the absence of a consistent screening policy, it may be far easier to secure employment in one subsidiary than another – which would be unfair. Checks that are applied incorrectly in one subsidiary may result in someone missing out on employment – which isn’t just unfair but also potentially illegal. And then there’s the added consideration of an employee transferring from one subsidiary company with a relaxed screening policy to one with a tighter policy. Unless the latter has post-employment screening in place, they’ll be taking onboard an employee who would have failed their screening checks if they’d joined as a new recruit.

When your business grows to the point where it owns subsidiary businesses, there’s every chance that recruitment may be handled very differently from one business to the next

Simply having a consistent, streamlined, group-wide policy isn’t the sole consideration though. For any multi-national group, what’s legal in one country might be illegal – or merely culturally unacceptable – in another. That’s when it pays to be up to speed on all the local nuances that need to be factored into a subsidiary screening policy.

Centralisation is often the answer here, with the corporate HQ taking charge of determining the screening policy and then cascading this down through the corporate structure. The flexibility to account for legal differences at a national level needs to be built into both the policy and the screening infrastructure but, this aside, the aim should be to deliver a consistent recruitment experience, no matter how large the group.