Tips Guides Resources

Pre-employment background checks will reduce your organization’s liability risk and help you trim down the costs incurred by high turnover. This article will provide you with information that can help you learn how to improve your hiring process with pre-employment background checks. Whether you’re an executive, a manager or a team leader, the following information will be beneficial to you.

Excellent for checking criminal records, falsified educational credentials and other serious liabilities, background checks only reveal information when an individual has been caught being deceitful. Of equal or greater value are underlying attitudes, as well as actions at which an applicant has not been caught, to most fully protect your organization against negligent hiring lawsuits and to assure you are hiring reliable, ethical, hard-working employees.

Knowing this information about the people you hire is absolutely essential because a business can be held liable for accidents and crimes committed by its employees.
Pre-employment background checks can include:

Instant Criminal Database Background Checks
- National Criminal Search with SSN Trace
- State Criminal Search with SSN Trace
- Sex Offender Registry
- Watch List
- County Criminal Court Search
- Federal District Criminal Search

Credit Bureau Background Checks
- Credit Bureau SSN Trace
- Employment Credit Report

Civil Record Background Checks
- County Civil Court Search
- Federal District Bankruptcy Search
- Federal District Civil Search

Verification Services
- Education Verification
- Employment Verification
- Professional License Verification

Drug Screening Services
- Urinalysis - 5 & 10 Panel - Quest
- Urinalysis - 5 & 10 Panel - Labcorp

Motor Vehicle Background Checks
- Driving Record

Health Care Sanction Database Services
- OIG LEIE (Medical Exclusion List)
- OIG Plus
- OIG Plus with One State
- OIG Plus with All 50 States

There are also other pre-employment background checks designed not only for hourly position applicants but for any position in your organization, entry-level to executive. They measure and assess job candidates regarding personal integrity, substance abuse, reliability and work ethic. These pre-employment background checks evaluate human resource management challenges that are increasingly eroding companies’ productivity and profitability:
- Theft
- Fraud
- Inventory shrinkage
- Unexcused absences
- Tardiness
- Drug use
- Clocking in or out for other employees
- Revealing confidential information and/or trade secrets to outsiders
- Carelessness
- Sub-par job performance
- Job-hopping
- Unauthorized use of the Internet
- Using company email for personal use
- Disclosing private and restricted computer data

Hiring qualified, honest employees is critical to the success of your business. Every day people with criminal records, falsified education credentials and other serious liabilities are hired by companies who fail to thoroughly check their backgrounds. Knowing the backgrounds of the people you hire is absolutely essential because a business can be held liable for accidents and crimes committed by its employees. The result can be acts leading to expensive negligent hiring lawsuits.

Pre-employment background checks will verify the accuracy and/or completeness of information provided by job applicants - before hiring and training — and thus reduce the costs incurred by high turnover and reduce your risk of liability. By implementing pre-employment background checks into your hiring process, your organization will be able to identify and predict problematic employee issues at all levels of the organization by pre screening prospective employees for patterns in behavior. Additionally, you will be able to identify job applicants that are honest, drug free, reliable, and hard working. Pre-employee background checks give you critical information for making hiring decisions you won’t regret.

Jim Sirbasku is co-founder and CEO of Profiles International, a leading provider of human resource management solutions and employment assessments for businesses worldwide. For more information about using pre-employment background checks, visit our website.