General

What Are Employee Background Verifications and Why Are They Important

It is always a very big investment for companies to hire new employees. The hiring managers hope that the new employees will be with their company for a considerably long period of time. The owners hope that the new recruits will always perform to their fullest levels. The hiring managers exercise a lot of caution while hiring new employees and they go through a lot of checks. The sad and troubling part is that even after putting in such efforts there’s no saying for sure that the hiring managers will always manage to hire good employees. It can be denied that sometimes bad hires are just inevitable and unavoidable.

Why are these verifications so important

Hiring a bad employee can actually be very bad for the company in question on several fronts right from lower workplace morale or other problems for the company. Managers often have to clean up all the mess that the bad hires have made and then they have to go through the entire process of hiring new employees, all over again. One of the best ways of substantially reducing your chances of making bad hires would be by conducting employee background verification before making any sort of an offer to the candidate or applicant in question. In today’s day and age, a lot of applicants are known to lie on their resumes and also with-hold important information so employee background verification is imperative to find out if the applicant in question is lying or is keeping some important information a secret.

Where’s what employee background verifications entail

In most employee background verifications, usually the name or social security number of the applicant in question is used to dig up information on them from public as well as private databases. If you feel your hiring managers won’t be able to do the verification on their own, they you can use to hire service providers who offer such services. Usually, you can expect the employee background verification to cover areas like..

  • Identity verification
  • Criminal history
  • Employment history
  • Education background
  • Motor vehicle records
  • Licenses issued by the government
  • Credit checks

All in all, employee background verification checks ensure that the candidate in question is clean and doesn’t have a dishonest past. In addition to all the information that has been found out in the verification check, you can consider contacting the previous employers of the applicant and you can also check their different social media accounts. Information is key at the end of the day and the more information you have, the lesser will be your chances of making a bad hire.

Here’s why employee background verification checks are so important

Most people don’t realize it but there are actually a lot of benefits of employee background verifications. These checks aren’t just meant to hire the right person. Over and above this main benefit, there are plenty of benefits of conducting employee background verification checks. Let’s have a look at these benefits.

  • Check if the candidate is qualified :- It is actually a very common practice for applicants to embellish their work history and educational background when they are applying for different open positions in an organization. Thus, it makes all the more sense for hiring managers to conduct background checks because failing to do so, the hiring mangers can end up hiring someone who is simply unqualified for the position for which applications have been invited by qualified employees.
  • Character Check :- You might think that someone exaggerating on their resume is a trivial issue but actually it is an obvious sign of dishonesty that can prove to be the disastrous for the company thinking of hiring them. Just remember one thing, if an applicant lies on his resume to get a job then there’s always a chance that he will lie when he’s on the job. Thus you should always run background checks to ensure you only hire people with character and integrity.
  • Ensure the safety of your workplace :- As a hiring manager you need to ensure the safety of your workplace and this can be done by hiring employees with a clean record and especially employees who don’t have a previous criminal history. You can end up putting the safety of all the people on your work premises at risk if you end up hiring someone with a criminal history.

Wrapping Up

There you have it, that was all you needed to know about the important of employee background checks. You can benefitted on several fronts by opting for these checks. One of the most significant benefits of these checks is that you will be able to lower your insurance costs and avoid needless lawsuits by hiring people who clear background checks. Further, you will end up saving a lot of money and time by making the right hire in the first instance, to ensure that you don’t have to go through the ordeal of hiring another employee for the position, all over again.