The higher the position within the company, the higher the risks if the person holding that job is not properly vetted. Hiring employees to fill top management positions is a huge responsibility for Human Resources departments and it requires comprehensive background checks. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter who you hire for lower positions. To keep the company and its staff safe you need a pre-employment screening policy that weeds out dangerous characters altogether. Here’s what you can do.
Mandatory criminal history checks
Even if the law doesn’t require background checks for the type of jobs you’re offering, you should consider making criminal history checks mandatory for all your staff. It saves you a lot of potential trouble in the future and gives you some peace of mind.
How can background checks help? That’s quite simple to explain.
People in HR are well aware of the high costs of workplace theft. We’re not even talking about the employee that pockets a couple of markers, that’s unavoidable. We’re talking about organized theft and people infiltrating your organisation with this sole purpose in mind.The higher the position, the easiest it is to defraud a company.
Workplace fraud costs millions of dollars and if you look at statistics you’ll discover that almost 10% of those involved had deception-related offences on their record.
That’s reason enough to ask your job applicants to submit to a quick background check via readily available services like www.australiannationalcharactercheck.com.au which enable the process online for HR departments. It’s easy, everything can be done online using a character check agency, and you get a full national police check on anyone in a couple of days.
Why do you need identity checks
Identity theft has been on the rise in Australia for the past few years and the Covid-19 pandemic only made matters worse. Most identity theft cases have to do with online fraud, but there have been some high profile cases of people using an assumed identity to gain employment. And not for some menial job. No one would use a fake identity to get a maintenance job, it’s those that are aiming for management positions that would be interested in doing that.
Doing background checks on all employees helps check if the candidates are indeed who they say they are, but you should also check their educational credentials carefully.
Forging a degree diploma is an easy job with all the modern equipment people have around the house. A good printer can produce high-quality fake papers that could fool anyone.
Always check to see if the person you’re considering hiring for a top position did go to a certain school and make sure they graduated.
Also, have a look at the employment history of a candidate. If you’re very impressed with the companies they’ve worked for, do ask yourself how come they’re looking for a new job? Who leaves a good company to face an uncertain future?
In other words, use maximum caution if a candidate seems quite amazing. You know the saying, if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.
