Screening for permanent employees

Pre-employment screening is where most businesses first encounter a screening provider like Verifile. Whether you’re screening one new hire per year or bringing in hundreds of new members of staff every month, engaging a screening provider suggests you’re taking the risks of recruitment sufficiently seriously.

You need to know that the person in front of you is who they claim to be. Anyone being economical with the truth represents a risk within your workforce. The scope of that risk ranges from merely being an untrustworthy person to have around, through to being someone who will cause you to breach regulatory standards or who will act in a criminal fashion while employed by you.

The fall-out from such incidents can be significant. There can be a financial cost, a reputational cost, maybe even a human cost. Some of these are obvious; some are more hidden. Either way, there is a huge benefit to be had from getting your recruitment right at the first time of asking. With hundreds of different types of checks available in countries around the world, effective pre-employment background screening can help reduce the risk of hiring the wrong person.

But this only tells part of the story of how background screening can help protect your business. The checks you run on a potential new recruit can be run again on a regular basis, to monitor whether their circumstances have changed. Consideration should also be given to those people who don’t appear on your payroll but work for you nonetheless, whether on a temporary or contract basis.

And what about the businesses you work with; your suppliers and their staff who have access to your premises and your data? What about prospective customers? Wouldn’t you like to be as reassured about them as you are about your employees?

And even if you think your screening is as watertight as it can be, how confident are you in your ability to screen to the same level overseas, in all the countries you’re operating in or from – or that any subsidiary businesses of yours are screening to a similarly high standard? The potential applications of comprehensive background screening extend far further than the traditional, full-time, contracted workforce.