Hire4Integrity: A Background Check Dialogue Addressing Employment Screening Issues Of The Day

Here's our annual singing Christmas card sent with thanks and best wishes for a great New Year!

There are obvious hiring practices that should be avoided such as asking for an applicant’s picture or identifying their age, religion, race, marital status or birthplace. However, there are some practices that are not so obvious to avoid. Here are five of the most common risky practices that you should steer clear of in your organization.

Although background checks can be a time consuming process, you can speed up it up by providing your background check vendor with all of the information you possibly can. There are few data consolidators that exist for education and employment verifications; most of them having a limited amount of data. Here are five simple things you can do to ensure your checks are completed as thoroughly and quickly as possible.

There is still a lot of undiscovered and undefined territory when it comes to searching social media sites and viewing a candidate’s online persona. However, when you really break it down the primary concerns related to social media searches are similar to the challenges placed on traditional background screening. 

What happens when the background check results come back as a grey area? Do you know how your vendor handles circumstances such as these? When choosing a vendor you have to take certain steps to make sure they are the perfect fit for your company. Here are a few factors to consider in selecting a background check provider.

The FTC has approved only one consumer reporting agency, Social Intelligence, as a legal provider of social media background checks in the United States after issuing a letter claiming that they are in compliance with the FCRA. According to SocialIntelhr.com, the company earned this approval as they maintain “‘reasonable procedures’ designed to ensure that the consumer report is only used for permissible purposes, require employers to obtain signed Disclosure and Authorization forms from the individuals to be background checked, ensure employers follow FCRA Adverse Action procedures, and have a complete dispute resolution process.” 

As the holiday season approaches, retail stores are gearing up by hiring more staff to handle the shopping blitz.  I'd like to share with you some information regarding the prevalence of background screening in the retail industry. If you need to begin a screening program, re-evaluate your current program or improve your time to hire, contact us today. Here is what I've found:

As an HR professional, you know that processes and paper work are ever changing. With that in mind, it’s always good to review the basics. So over the next few blog posts we are going to talk about some of the building blocks of a thorough and legally compliant background check. To start out, we know that criminal record searches are a very valuable part of the hiring process and as a business professional you must under that your company has options. However, you must be able to understand these options and how to use them in the best way possible to achieve maximum benefits from your background screening service. Because there are multiple criminal search options out there, Tandem Select has put together a best practice checklist for selecting criminal history searches and how to use these services properly.

As I reach out to propsective clients to discuss the merits of Tandem Select and background checks in general, I've run into  may different personality types. But I can place these folks into four general categories when it comes to their attitudes and beliefs on the efficacy of a comprehensive pre-employment screening program: