Business faces challenges recruiting and retaining employees.
Employees can be the greatest asset or the biggest risk of a business. Workforce integrity and trustworthiness are crucial.
Pre-employment screening can be the difference between hiring an excellent employee or subsequently finding you have a workplace liability. The goal of employment screening is two-fold:
- Verify the best candidates for the role; i.e. those with the best requisite skills and expertise for the position.
- Avoid costly mistakes. These may be hiring costs, negative effect on your brand, downstream employee behaviour or on your existing employees.
A helpful reference is the Australian Standard AS 4811-2022 Employment Screening to learn more. This includes the objectives of employment screening: ensuring integrity, identity, credentials and providing assurance on trustworthiness:
Why a Framework?
Employment screening is best approached with a strategic framework. Essentially, it’s just a prudent business process. The benefits of having a strategic, consistent risk management approach more than justify the investment it takes.
Steps to implement a robust employment screening framework
- Identify screening requirements based on specific roles and their risk profile e.g. positions where employees have access to data, finance, systems or other sensitive organisational information. Note: the exposure risk is not always in the high-level roles in an organisation. Think admin/support roles with ready access to information.
- Map employment checks to specific roles e.g. finance roles may require more probity and therefore more checks.
- Ensure you have quality screening checks in place. Think identify verification, right to work confirmation, qualification, membership and reference checks, police checks, psychometric testing and more.
- Don’t under screen – this may lead to an inappropriate hire.
- Don’t over screen – it’s a time and resource waster.
- Include in the framework pre-employment checks and checks when promotions occur. Consider screening with role changes, too, as the risk profile may have changed also.
Broadly speaking, an employment screening framework aims to prevent merit-based selection processes from being undermined by false or incomplete information.
Source: NSW ICAC Strengthening employment screening practices in the NSW public sector report – February 2018. icac.nsw.gov.au
So, before you even commence talent acquisition, implementing a structured approach to employment screening is recommended. Help identify application fraud early by verifying the information on an applicant’s resume. How much gilding the lily is acceptable to your organisation? Filter fraudulent applicants and make way for the best candidates to join your organisation.
The old adage, prevention is better than the cure, applies here. The cost of employee attrition is something organisations want to avoid as the investment they make in onboarding new employees is significant. The more you know about your candidate, what drives and motivates them, their ethics and integrity, the better.
Develop an employment screening framework. Hire with confidence. Maintain a quality workforce. VerifyNow can help.
