Screening Employees: Before, During, and/or After?

Remember those tests in high school, those multiple choice tests? They were usually in the fashion of A, B, C, D, or all of the above. Well, if someone were to ask you should you screen your employees before you hire them, during their employment, or even perhaps after they are dismissed, or transferred to another department internally, the answer would be at least A and B if not “all of the above.” Certainly, when you are dismissing a person, or they are moving on to another employer, it is probably not necessary to run a background check on the employee.

However, dismissing on the grounds of redundancy is a whole another area. You might have to get employer legal advice from a professional consultancy service that specializes in employment law. With regard to screening, a smart employer will run the necessary background checks on those employees for they are hired. It is not uncommon, for example, for many retailers to run drug tests on their employees. It is also not uncommon, and indeed is often required by regulations, for those in the healthcare industry to run tests on employees, especially those with sensitive positions such as pharmacists, nurses, or doctors.

The Smart Choice is to Screen Employees on a Regular Basis

In fact, in this increasingly litigious society, smart employers in almost every industry are moving towards some type of background check of their employees. For example, many employees may look at employee driver records, or do some due diligence to verify previous employment and or education. Having a third-party to contact and verify references, for example, is also increasingly a best practice. With concerns about immigration running at all-time highs, it is also necessary to utilize the E-Verify and I-9 systems in some industries. Employers, in some, face many incentives and regulatory requirements to screen employees.

Before a hiring decision is made, it is rather obvious that some type of screening should be conducted. By working with an experienced background check provider, you can gain and leverage their expertise at screening employees before you commit to a hiring decision. Similarly, it is also a best practice, especially in sensitive industries to rerun employee screenings and background checks on a regular basis. Obviously, any employees who have access to sensitive information or substances should be under more intense scrutiny than those who do not.

Finally, the advent of cybercrime makes it increasingly important to screen employees even in ways that in previous decades might have been considered unnecessary. An employee with credit or debt problems may be vulnerable to the incentives of financial cybercrime, and today’s Internet enabled system makes those temptations ever present.

The chief executive officer of Intel, Andy Grove, once said that only the paranoid survive. In terms of screening employees, before and during employment, this is certainly true.