Screening new hires prevents fraud and ensures businesses are not putting their employees, customers, and reputation at risk by hiring someone with a criminal history. What too many employers don’t fully understand, however, is exactly what goes into a background check.
KRESS works with employers, hiring managers, and H.R. personnel every day to help educate and inform them on our pre-employment screening services and how they can benefit businesses across different industries. The truth is a background check can consist of whatever legally obtainable information your organization finds useful in making a smart hiring decision.
KRESS even offers customizable screening packages to suit the needs of any employer. Typically, our background checks will investigate a candidate’s background based on criteria determined by their prospective or current employer. A check of a candidate’s background may include verification of past employment, education, criminal records, motor vehicle, and license record checks. For certain jobs, credit history can be checked, as well. Each kind of check will reveal different information pertinent to that check.
Sometimes, clients come to KRESS after trying to run background checks on job candidates themselves. We never recommend this! Online searches are a do-it-yourself form of background checks that only show public information. Employers type a job candidate’s name into a search engine and check for results on business pages or social media sites. While these searches are usually free, such “background checks” consist of information that may be unreliable, out of date, or out of context. In some cases, these searches can later be proven in court to be discriminatory. That can be costly!
In order to mitigate risk, we verify the qualifications of potential employees, including education, certification, employment history, reference checks, and industry-specific verifications. This is called pre-employment verification. If your company is considering verifying the information of an applicant, here are the most common verifications:
Education Verification
Education history is the most falsified information on a resume. In order to verify that your applicant has provided accurate education information, KRESS verifies the candidate’s degrees and dates of attendance.
Employment Verification
To verify that employment history is accurate, salary history, reason for termination, eligibility for rehire, starting and ending positions, and dates of employment are checked. KRESS verifies seven years of past employment history for one flat rate, no matter how many employers the candidate provides.
Reference Verification
Reference verification results offer insight into a candidate’s trustworthiness, reliability, competency, and integrity. A verification of business and/or personal credentials is a valuable source of information about the applicant’s general image as perceived by others.
Professional License Verification
A professional license verification confirms your candidates’ representations about their qualifications. This process authenticates the veracity of your candidates’ license and indicates if it is currently in good standing and issued in the candidate’s name.
Social Media Screening
A screening solution that utilizes web and social data. We help companies leverage bias-free public content in their employment decisions without a messy, complicated workflow to accomplish compliant screening practices with values-based goals.
KRESS will only offer the services that your organization needs to stay secure and compliant. Our packages are fully customizable to your specific needs. Want to know how? Contact us today for a consultation on your background check requirements. We’ll help identify the ideal pre-employment screening package for your business.