Increasingly, employment screening is a global undertaking. Recruiting staff from abroad brings a raft of new considerations into any employer’s screening policy. The same applies when recruiting British employees who have lived or worked abroad previously. The types of checks that employers want to run don’t change – but the way in which those checks are conducted in different countries does.
As well as helping to bring employees into the UK, our screening activities can also help domestic companies expand their operations overseas. Knowing they have appropriate screening procedures in place for hiring staff in that country might be the final reassurance they need before pressing ahead with their expansion plans.
The reverse of this also applies; adding an inbound employment element to our offering. In such a case, a foreign business looking to establish operations in the UK may engage us to make sure that the British staff it hires adhere to all applicable regulations and best practice standards.
As we currently run thousands of international checks per month, we are well versed in the complexities of such checks. That complexity can increase how long these checks take; something which can extend the length of a new joiner’s onboarding process. It can also add to the cost, especially in countries where the checks involve manual, rather than automated, processes.
Neither of these points are ideal from an employer’s point of view. However, in the ongoing risk and reward debate, there seems to be a growing acceptance of this as a necessary component of building a more international workforce.
For our part, we continue to add to our list of international
data sources that we can integrate with directly. Replacing existing suppliers, adding new ones and carefully monitoring the data outputs of the suppliers we already use is a full-time job in itself – but crucially important in the quest to deliver a truly global service.