Month: May 2024
Labor experts tell us that 8 out of 10 hiring professionals do some form of pre-employment background screening. Yet many medium and small businesses and are still dependent on traditional methods of pre-employment background screening, such as checking up on references. This article explores why many SMBs avoid professional employment background checks, and the risks and dangers of doing so.
Why Many SMBs Don’t Do Pre-Employment Background Screening
Lack of concern. Some SMB managers believe that only cops, teachers, and doctors should be subject to employment background checks. That point of view is outdated. Nowadays, many private companies are consistently performing pre-employment background screening, for the reasons listed in the second half of this article.
Lack of Internal Support and Expert Knowledge. Many SMB leaders assume that any pre-employment background screening they do must be done in-house. The prospect of training an employee to carry out background checks is intimidating to most managers, especially since it could very well take a person months to research the best background check procedures. However, partnering with pre-employment background screening outsourcing firms allows all companies quick, convenient access to employment background checks.
Overestimation of Cost. Many SMB leaders hold a misconception about pre-employment background screening, namely that it’s exorbitantly expensive. If you’re open to the possibility of outsourcing your employment background checks, you can typically conduct pre-employment background screening for no more than $50 per job candidate.
Top 5 Reasons Why SMBs should Conduct Employment Background Checks
1. Decreased Costs. You’ll find better job candidates if you conduct pre-employment background screening. Improved hiring means that you’ll spend less money counteracting negative PR, lose less money to negligent hiring lawsuits, and see fewer employee-generated losses, such as embezzlement. Finally, it’s typically much less expensive to outsource employment background checks, rather than doing them in-house.
2. Fewer legal trip-ups. Each state has its own law in place regarding negligent hiring. These laws are intended to protect the public by preventing dangerous individuals from being hired for delicate positions. As an example, many states’ alcohol laws require that employees have three years of felony-free history before they can be hired for a job that involves serving alcohol. Failing to check out candidates backgrounds through pre-employment background screening opens you to the risk of being sued or fined for failing to do your due diligence on new hires.
3. Safer Employees. Human Resource gurus estimate that 1 out of 10 job applicants have a criminal history. If you don’t carry do employment background checks, it’s more likely that you’ll hire a dangerous individual who could hurt your employees, your customers, and your business’ reputation.
4. Accelerated hiring. The majority of pre-employment background screening companies offer results in 48 hours. In this sense, outsourcing employee background checks can mean speedier hiring. In just a day or two, you can get the information you need to determine if that seemingly perfect candidate has any skeletons lurking in his or her closet.
5. Discover dishonesty in applications. Here’s another scary HR statistic for you: researchers calculate that approximately 4 out of 10 resumes feature deceitful omissions, if not total lies. Employment background checks reveal such dishonesty so that you can avoid hiring mendacious individuals.
As we’ve seen, there are many reasons why owners of small and medium-sized businesses should arrange employee background checks.
With increasing competition in job market, there is also an increase of fake credentials and forge documents provided by the candidates to get a higher position. These types of candidates not only deprive of the right of other candidate who have the original credentials, but also dangerous for the company itself. Therefore, the importance of pre employment background screening has been increasing with every single day.
Background screening of an employee is primarily a work of Human Resource department of a company. But most of the companies hire professional background screening companies to do the task for them. There are several good reasons for hiring a professional company. We will discuss few of them in little detail.
First and foremost reason for hiring a professional screening company is that, if a screening company is good, it will certainly have years of experience in employment verification, criminal background screening, educational document verification and so on. Hence, these companies can screen the background of a candidate far better than the in-house screening done by the human resource department.
Another good reason for hiring a professional background screening service provider is that they do it very fast. A first priority of any HR department is to complete the hiring process as quickly as possible. And if HR gets involve in screening of a candidate, the task may get slow because of other human resource related course. It can become a hassle for HR and for candidate both. So HR prefers to hire a background screening company do the process fast.
Furthermore, cost saving is one thing that make a company to hire screening company. If HR does it by itself, it will need in-house professionals to do the screening of candidates. Means company has to pay these professionals to do the screening, other costs are also involved. On the other hand, HR finds services of background screening companies cost effective. The reason of cost effectiveness is that these companies already have established networks; they are specialized in their work. They find no hassle in doing background screening of an employee anywhere in the world, and hence become cost effective.
Conclusion
Pre employment background screening is one most important task which no company wants to overlook. But this work needs specialization, and background screening companies usually have years of experience and are specialized in executing the task efficiently. Therefore, HR department should think about hiring a good background screening company before establishing an in-house section for screening of a job candidate.
UK employment disputes grievances and court structure is illustrated by the high-profile Chagger v Abbey National plc & Hopkins (2006) legal case, where the Tribunal made a finding of racial discrimination which led to the record 2.8 million compensation award. Abbey Santander banking group (the UK retail bank due to be re-branded as Santander price, and being part of the gigantic Emilio Botin Banco Santander Central Hispano Group, BSCH) terminated Balbinder Chagger’s employment in 2006, asserting compulsory redundancy as the reason. Mr Chagger, on the other hand, believed the true reason behind his dismissal was racial discrimination. Mr Chagger was of Indian origin and worked as a Trading Risk Controller for Santander 2009. He earned about 100,000 per annum and reported into Nigel Hopkins.
An employee who has suffered employment related unfairness and/or discrimination could decide to make an appeal. The initial place of appeal would be to the employer, in the form of a formal grievance. The employee lodges a formal grievance letter with the employer, and the employer is responsible for processing the grievance and deciding the outcome. Thus, the employer is given the first the opportunity to handle the employment dispute and to close it satisfactorily. Mr Chagger’s grievances and issues, however, were simply dismissed out of hand by Emilio Botin Abbey Santander share price.
If the employee and the employer are unable to resolve their employment dispute by themselves, then the employee may appeal to an Employment Tribunal for an objective resolution. UK Employment Tribunals will hear matters about redundancy payments, unfair dismissal and discrimination. Mr Chagger took his matter to the Employment Tribunal by initiating legal action against both Santander Abbey and Mr Hopkins, on the grounds of unfair dismissal and racial discrimination. The Employment Tribunal considered the evidence and ruled that Mr Chagger had in fact been both dismissed unfairly and racially discriminated against by both Abbey Santander and Mr Hopkins. In order to remedy the wrong of race discrimination Santander Abbey had committed, the Employment Tribunal ordered the company to reinstate Mr Chagger. However, Santander Abbey refused to comply with the Employment Tribunal’s reinstatement order. The Employment Tribunal then ordered Abbey Santander to pay Mr Chagger 2.8 million compensation for his loss, as an alternative to reinstatement.
The party that is dissatisfied with the Employment Tribunal’s ruling may appeal to the next higher-level court, being the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT). The EAT will look into appeals against rulings made by the Employment Tribunals. The appeals must only be about points of law (i.e., an appeal must only be about mistakes in legal reasoning by the Employment Tribunal). The EAT will not look into matters about facts of the case. In 2008, Santander Abbey and Mr Hopkins appealed to the EAT against the Employment Tribunal’s ruling of racial discrimination and against the record-breaking 2.8 million compensation awarded. The EAT considered the appeals. It upheld the original Employment Tribunal’s ruling that Santander Abbey and Mr Hopkins had racially discriminated against Mr Chagger in respect of his dismissal. However, it accepted Santander Abbey’s appeal concerning the 2.8 million compensation award and decided to send back the compensation amount to the original Employment Tribunal for reconsideration.
The party that is dissatisfied with the ruling of the EAT may make an appeal to the next higher-level court, the Court of Appeal (the second highest court in the land). The Court of Appeal will look into appeals against rulings made by the EAT. As before, the appeals must only be about points of law (i.e., an appeal must only be about mistakes in legal reasoning by the EAT). The Court of Appeal will not look into matters about facts of the case. In 2009, the Chagger v Santander Abbey case was appealed to the Court of Appeal. The Court of Appeal’s List of Hearings showed that the case was heard on 7 and 8 July 2009. The Court of Appeal’s records concerning the outcome of the hearing were not available at the time of writing this article. The 11KBW set of barristers’ chambers (who represented Santander Abbey and Mr Hopkins), had reported that the hearing was to be only about quantum (i.e., compensation) and not liability also (i.e., not racial discrimination also). That would appear to suggest that the wrong of race discrimination committed by Abbey Santander and Mr Hopkins was finalised by the EAT (it upheld the original Employment Tribunal’s finding that Mr Hopkins and Santander Abbey had racially discriminated against Mr Chagger), and that Mr Chagger had appealed against the EAT’s ruling to send back the compensation amount back to the Employment Tribunal stage for reconsideration.
The party that is dissatisfied with the ruling of the Court of Appeal may appeal to the next higher-level court, the House of Lords. Appeals to the House of Lords require the Court of Appeal’s approval. Furthermore, the Court of Appeal must require the House of Lords to decide upon a question of general public importance. As previously, appeals to the House of Lords must only concern points of law and not be about facts of the case. The House of Lords is the highest court in the land and the final stage of appeal for most legal cases in the UK. Occasionally, cases may be approved for appeal to the European Court of Justice, which has jurisdiction on matters of European Community law.
Surveys conducted by independent agencies show that a whopping 80 % of the graduates rely solely on online resources to search for jobs. This clearly shows the amazing popularity that online recruitment enjoys among potential employees. It is clear from the above figure that businesses who are investing in newspaper advertising to recruit graduate talent for their organizations are clearly wasting their time and money.
In another study recently conducted by an employment agency a whopping 89% of the surveyed candidates stated that they only search for jobs online and nowhere else. They have gained a clear impression that major companies use online resources exclusively for all their recruitment needs. Newspaper advertisements for jobs, they feel, do not reflect the best jobs available in the recruitment sector.
Specialist recruitment agencies claim that the number of hits they get on their online recruitment sites have increased tremendously over the last three to four years. Respondents also claim to use social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to look up corporate website updates. Fresh vacancies are usually put up by corporate on their Facebook account site through their status updates before they are made public through other sources.
Even professionals prefer searching online recruitment sites for better openings. Sectors such as Retail, Finance and Costumer Service professionals depend on online resources to search for better job prospects rather than look up vacancy sections in newspapers. In fact the tremendous response to online recruitment sites from professionals has forces some portals to launch specialized boards that list vacancies exclusively of jobs pertaining to a particular sector or category. The EngineerBoard launched by Jobsite in 2006, is one such classic example.
There are many benefits of advertising online, especially for professional job openings. Reduced costs of recruitment and less time taken to complete the hiring process are two of the major advantages. Apart from these, the application and selection process is extremely streamlined and consistent. These factors contribute highly to the success of online recruitment campaigns. Companies are also eager to communicate their organizational culture and benefits to potential employers through their online recruitment advertisements so that they are able to attract the best talent available.
Welcome to Recruitment Genius an online recruitment advertising service provider for your business. If you are ready to online recruitment for your business and want a way to find the best local candidates available then Recruitment Genius online recruitment company could well be the answer.