Top 5 Reasons to Conduct Pre-Employment Background Checks

Conducting pre-employment background checks adds an extra step and cost to the hiring process, but it can help protect your company tremendously.  From workplace safety to regulatory concerns there are many reasons to conduct background checks before making a hire.

 It’s also important to conduct background checks on short-term staff, though this can be tedious if you need someone to start right away. If you are hiring with Faveo, don’t worry, the background check process has already been completed on all of our helpmates.

 Here are five reasons to make background checks part of your hiring process:

1. Workplace Safety

Workplace safety is of the utmost importance, especially this year. If the employee will be working with heavy equipment, hazardous materials, or be in a position with high safety or security standards, you’ll want to conduct a background check and potentially a drug screen or driving record check.

If someone has a recent history of reckless behavior or heavy drug and alcohol use, you may not want to put them in a role that requires a lot of driving or operation of heavy machinery. Of course, people can change their behaviors so use your best judgement when reviewing background check results.

2. Regulatory Compliance

Regulatory compliance can be hard to navigate for many employers, but background checks can help. In HireRight’s annual Benchmarking Report, companies named regulatory compliance as their second largest business challenge. 44 percent of businesses surveyed reported that background screening helped them improve their regulatory compliance.

Many employers are required by government regulation, insurance policies, or their customers to conduct proper background checks. Background checks can also ensure that you are only hiring people authorized to work in your region to prevent legal issues down the road.

3. Improved Quality of Hire

Background checks can check for more than just criminal activity. You can run background checks to verify licenses, credentials, education, and work history. Ensuring that you are hiring honest and qualified people can reduce turnover and help you make better hires.

4. Reduced Workplace Violence

Each year, around 2 million workers in the United States experience workplace violence. This results in liability to the company, trauma to the victim, and a large amount of missed work. Keep your workplace safe by conducting a background check to uncover whether a potential employee has a history of violence or sexual misconduct.

5. Minimizing Theft

Employee theft and fraud is a serious issue and can be costly to your business. Organizations lose approximately 5% of their yearly revenue to employee fraud each year. An employee theft scheme lasts 14 months on average before it’s detected. That’s a long time to have a dishonest employee working in your business. Many of the perpetrators of employee theft do not have prior criminal records, but prior fraudulent activity can be an indicator of potentially problematic behavior in the future. It’s best to conduct a background check and be aware of potential risks.

Hire Vetted Staff

HireRight’s 2020 Global Benchmark report revealed that only 48% of businesses perform background checks on their temporary workers. Even fewer businesses screen independent contractors, interns, and volunteers. This is concerning as the use of gig and contract workers is on the rise, and temporary and contract workers may still have access to private business or client information. They also often work in roles where safety measures are important.

Don’t make that mistake, hire with Faveo! When you hire temporary contract workers through Faveo, you know that you are getting background checked and vetted staff. Finding on-demand labor for your business shouldn’t be a hassle. Faveo makes hiring short-term help easy so you can operate with flexibility and efficiency.