Ongoing employment screening: A valuable tool

Every industry undertakes some form of pre-employment screening.  It’s an important part of talent acquisition. Background screening can help you identify both the best candidates and potentially inappropriate ones.

But is that enough? Is the initial screening adequate to ensure individuals remain a valuable asset? In our opinion, no.  Employment screening should be ongoing.  Below are reasons why ongoing screening is beneficial for productivity, safety and maintaining the best talent. Think transparency, integrity and trust.

Change

People can change during their tenure with a company. They may experience professional or personal challenges that have a behavioural impact affecting productivity or other employees.

These challenges may leave individuals vulnerable to undue influence, security breaches or fraud. It’s prudent to conduct regular so-called ‘health checks’ on the organisation – in particular employees with access to finances, confidential data or the well-being of other employees.

Continuous employee screening can be the difference between hiring an excellent employee and subsequently finding you have a liability in the workplace.

Employee promotion or changes in role

We recommend you factor employment screening into the promotion process.  As responsibilities increase, so too can access to finances, confidential data and systems.  Also, changes in a role can change its risk factors.

Screening to help mitigate your exposure to possible security breaches is clearly simple diligence and a prudent aspect of a responsible company’s obligation to itself, its shareholders and fellow staff members.

Psychological testing can be an asset at this time.  The assessment of leadership/management capabilities is a great opportunity to not only identify potential weaknesses and address them but to highlight strengths. Psychometric assessments can also identify areas to improve team dynamics including personality diversity, key strengths, and potential blockers. The key is to ensure a candidate’s success in their new role.

Case in point: You know an existing employee in their current role.  You consider them as up to the challenge of the promotion.  So, here’s the chance to learn more about how an individual operates, their leadership style, their communication style/preferences, and so forth and empower them to be successful.  This can only benefit your business overall.

Compliance management

A variety of legislative, compliance and industry requirements drive ongoing employment screening.  For example, the aged care industry in Australia requires police checks for employees.

You need to ensure job-specific qualifications are current, memberships and licences are valid, police checks are up to date and job requirements compliant with industry regulations.

Rather than an onerous obligation, this is an opportunity to address any concerns that may arise and structure your response accordingly. Again, this is an opportunity to fine-tune and enhance your operations.

Qualifications, memberships

Certain job roles require valid licences or professional qualifications to be maintained.

How are you managing this? Were appropriate checks undertaken when candidates were identified for their existing role?

Ongoing screening can help manage the qualification requirements of individual employees. Your organisation could be taking on unnecessary risk by not conducting regular checks on its employees and their role requirements.

• Are employee qualifications current?
• Are professional memberships up to date?
• Are licences current?
• Are there any licence suspensions or offences you’re not aware of?

Mitigate risks by confirming:

• Continuing eligibility to work.
• Industry requirements are met.
• Requisite expertise exists.

Hire with confidence

More than ever, businesses recognise the value of ongoing screening.  The benefits of this risk management approach more than justify the investment it takes.

When you outsource some or all employment screening processes, you free up your talent acquisition teams to focus on providing higher value to your business.

An employment screening vendor makes your needs their priority. This ensures employment screening receives the focus it requires.

Partner with an established service not only for their expertise but for speed of return and support in managing the on-boarding and ongoing experience.

VerifyNow can help.

Cogent is a proud member of the Professional Background Screening Association. VerifyNow is the digital employment screening platform developed by Cogent.