BACKGROUND CHECKs: Everything You Need to Know about CORPORATE SCREENING
Corporate screening refers to the process of carrying out background checks on potential and existing employees. Through background checks, your organisation can gain additional information from third party sources. This will help you decide whether a candidate is qualified for a certain position or not. Some of the factors that may lead to disqualification of a candidate are:
- Criminal convictions
- Violating driving rules
- Misrepresentation of facts when it comes to the applicant’s work history or educational qualifications
- Poor credit history
- Lack of a valid working visa
Reasons why you should conduct background checks
There are several reasons why organisations conduct background checks. These may include:
- Information verification – you can implement background checks to verify information such as their level of education and credentials obtained, tenure, employment history, and their skills
- Safety – one of the primary reasons why companies conduct background checks is to avoid harm to:-
- Other employees through workplace violence or sexual harassment
- Its clients and the general public through such actions as aggressive behaviour on business premises and negligent driving
- The company itself through reputational damage or even financial loss
- Maximise productivity – past work history and performance can help reveal the applicant’s job skills, productivity, professionalism, and interpersonal skills. Hiring applicants whose skills stand out will help maximise your organisation’s productivity
- Compliance with the law – some regions and roles have laws requiring that employers carry out background checks
Background checks you can conduct through Induct For Work
Police Checks
While all your new hires become an integral part of your workforce, not all of them have good intentions. This is why in most industries, it has become mandatory for organisations to carry out police checks on potential and existing employees.
In Australia, there are two main forms of police checks:
- State police check – this form of police check is issued by the police department of the state you are in and contains criminal findings of that state only.
- National police check – this type of police check contains criminal findings from any state or territory in Australia. A national police check is further divided into three types:
- Name only – this is a search conducted against the applicant’s full name. It does not reveal findings of any criminal activity conducted under an alias or previous name unless it is disclosed.
- Name and fingerprint search – in this type of national police check, the applicant is required to schedule for a fingerprint screening appointment.
- Name and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation assessment – you may need to carry out this type of police check if your organisation is in the agricultural, mining, or any other sensitive industry.
Carrying out police checks can help applicants decide whether they should apply for a particular job in your organisation or not. It also helps you decide whether you should take into account certain criminal offences when hiring or not.
Employment Checks
Your potential hires’ exposure and work experience pay a key huge role in how well they fit into their new role. An employment check or a career history check seeks to verify that the candidate has worked in the firms they have mentioned on their resume.
Why is an employment check important?
Through an employment check, you will gain insights on the potential employees’:
- Work experience – it is not uncommon for potential employees to exaggerate their experience levels in favour of a good salary package.
- Previous job title and responsibilities held – you need to learn of the previous job title and responsibilities held by a potential candidate so that you can assign them a role that suits them. While conducting employment checks, ensure that you pay attention to responsibilities and work areas held in every organisation the applicant worked in.
- Work tenure – your potential hire’s work tenure is an accurate representation of their reliability. Conducting an employment check helps you see how much time the applicants have invested in the organisations they have worked in. Applicants who have stayed longer in past organisations have a higher chance of working for you for longer periods.
- Reason for leaving previous workplaces – not all applicants will be completely honest about their reason for leaving previous organisations. Carrying out an employment check lets you know whether a potential hire was terminated or resigned. In the case of the former, you’ll know of the reason for termination.
Qualification Checks
Most job positions require some level of education, with the most common educational requirement being a university degree. Due to the high rates of unemployment, incidents of job applicants providing forged degrees and certifications for a certain job are quite common. The internet has also led to the establishment of mills that churn out hundreds of fake degrees daily. This not only predisposes you to hire the wrong person but is also an injustice to deserving candidates.
Most organisations think that the simplest way of verifying applicants’ education is by calling the institutions on the resume. In reality, most of these institutions do not have the time to attend to all education check requests. This makes using software the only foolproof way of verifying applicants’ education background.
When carrying out qualification checks through Induct for Work, you can check and verify the institutions attended by the applicant, their level of qualification, certifications issued and even their graduation date. Your HR department will be able to effortlessly verify applicants’ academic qualifications within no time. This not only helps prevent a bad hire but also eliminates applicants whose educational background is unethical.
Vevo Visa Check
Before an immigrant starts working for you, Australia’s laws require that they have a work visa. A Visa Entitlement Verification Online (VEVO) visa check ensures that your potential employees are the right fit for your organisation. Induct for Work works with VEVO to ensure such details as:-
- Your potential hire’s visa type
- Its expiry date
- Working conditions (what the visa holder can and cannot do during their stay in Australia)
Verifying that your employees are eligible to work in Australia helps you avoid costly fines and penalties that could arise from a bad hire. For example, ignorance is no excuse for hiring a student who is only allowed to work for a certain number of hours per week but ends up working for more.
How it works
You have to get permission from the visa holder to conduct the check. You can do this by:-
- Listing is as a requirement on the employment contract
- Asking the visa holder to sign the Authority to Obtain Details of Work Rights Status
- Requesting the visa holder to file a Visa Entitlement Check and share the result with you
Your organisation could apply for a VEVO check account, but this takes 5 working days to be processed. Using Induct for Work to conduct VEVO checks saves you time. On completion, the VEVO visa check result will be emailed to your preferred email address.
Credit Checks
There’s nothing wrong with you as an employer asking for your potential hire’s credit history. After all, you need to hire employees that will protect the integrity of your organisation. While credit checks are not mandatory, you should carry them out on employees who will handle huge amounts of cash or any other form of financial transaction or manage your company’s accounts.
What should you look out for in employee credit checks?
Credit reports detail the employee’s history of borrowing and repaying the money. As an employer, you should be looking for:
- The employee’s decision-making ability – large amounts of credit and late fees could be red flags on an employee. This shows that they could have problems managing or budgeting their personal finances, a trait that could creep into their work life.
- Their history of handling money – you will need to carry out credit checks on employees handling your finances to ensure that your money is in good hands.
- Criminal activity – major derogatory marks on applicants could be a sign of the applicant’s potential to commit fraud.
Make sure that your employees are aware and consent to your carrying out of credit checks. Failure to alert them could lead to legal issues.
Traffic and Licence Checks
Do you carry out traffic and licence checks on employees driving for your business to ensure that they have a legal mandate to do so? If not, you are risking breaking the law or having your insurance cancelled. This is because not all drivers will notify you if they incur a penalty on their licence due to an offence.
Whether you are responsible for a small, medium or a large fleet, you have a legal obligation to validate the roadworthiness of your drivers. A traffic and licence search will reveal such things as:-
- Licence validity
- Category entitlement
- Violations
- Licence suspensions and/or revocations
- Failure to appear in court, and
- Arrest warrants
- Serious offences such as driving while drunk
- Inaccurate details on their licences such as an address mismatch
Regular traffic and licence checks should be part and parcel of any organisation’s health and safety policy as outlined by the Work Health and Safety Act 2011.
Apart from carrying out traffic and licence check at the point of onboarding, you should maintain an annual record.
Predictive Assessments
Simply put, predictive assessments use a potential employee’s historical data to predict their future performance. This is achieved through a combination of assessment science and actual data. This is better than conventional hiring practices which rely heavily on intuition-based conversations and resume screenings.
Depending on what you want to know, you can collect data from multiple sources and feed them on Induct for Work. This may include such information as the number of productive hours in a past job. The more the data sources, the better the predictive assessment will be. Induct for Work then cleans, formats and samples the data, thus making it ready for use in a predictive model.
Using predictive assessment improves the quality of your new hires. This is because it enables you to make the hiring decision based on how much value the candidate is going to bring to the organisation. Suppose you continue tracking your new employee’s performance say bi-annually, you’ll gain more insights that help you further optimise your recruitment efforts.
Using Induct for Work’s predictive assessment also helps you shorten the time it takes for you to hire a potential candidate. The tool lists applicants with the highest scores thus giving you an opportunity to make a decision based on facts.
International Checks
Most workplaces in Australia hire foreign workers to fill empty skill gaps and diversify their workplaces. According to a recent news article, there are about 1.4 million visa holders who have a right to work in Australia. This translates to about one in every 10 workers. While hiring foreigners may give you a competitive advantage, it presents a unique set of challenges especially when it comes to background screening.
Through Induct for Work, you can check information provided by potential candidates who have attended school, lived and worked in a foreign country. Through international checks, you can view gain insights on a potential hire’s criminal record, their education credentials and their employment history.
The outcome on international checks may be affected by such factors as the position being filled and the data protection regulations of the applicant’s country of origin.
Why Use Induct for Work to Carry Out Background Checks?
Induct for Work enables you to carry out different types of background checks on one dashboard. At the click of a button, you can obtain clear and accurate reports on all the above background checks. This saves you resources such as time and money.
Rather than providing you with a bundled plan, you can choose which screenings are appropriate for your industry. You can also choose background checks that appropriate for every kind of worker. This customisation feature makes this platform perfect for different kinds of industries.
Try Induct for Work online induction system that incorporates background checks by signing up for an obligation-free 14-day trial.
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