Whether you’ve been in business for many years now or are just preparing to launch your company, you need to have a good look at the most modern pre-employment checks. Important new trends have emerged over the past 10 years or so, and you might need to employ new types of checks to protect your investment and to keep your work force safe.
Let’s have a look at the basic pre-employment checks most Australian businesses use today.
How can police background checks help?
This emerging trend might come as a surprise for employers who know that according to the law they don’t have to worry about background checks as they are not mandatory for their activity.
Maybe they’re not mandatory, but they’re very useful. Do you have any idea how much a bad hire can end up costing? There’s a chance, for instance, that you hire a convicted fraudster and the question is can you afford to have a thief in your organisation? Can you afford to hire a sexual offender and risk a scandal, not to mention the possible disruptions in the workplace? Then, you’ll have no alternative but to fire that person and start all over again, and this costs money in terms of lost productivity and forcing your HR department to focus on job interviews instead of looking at ways to improve performance.
When you run a background check on all your employees you can avoid all these risks. If you’re wondering what’s so modern about background checks, you’ve probably never heard of online character check agencies like Australian national character check (ANCC) or Crimcheck Ltd before. There are many such agencies in Australia and they’re accredited with the federal government, so their results are 100% accurate and valid. What made these agencies so popular with Australian employers is the fact that they’re extremely easy to use. All you have to do is access the agency’s portal, input the required information on the job candidate and apply for a criminal history check. You get the results in a couple of days via email and you can be sure that the person in front of you is not an ex-convict and won’t pose a threat to your organisation.
The importance of social media checks
This is another trend that has emerged over the past decade as social media came to play such an important part in people’s lives.
When they start a social media account, people don’t think in terms of a future employment and what a potential employer might learn about them. People tend to be more open and honest on their social media accounts than they are when they write a CV.
Most Australian employers today do a quick check of a candidate’s social media to see what interesting things they might learn. For instance, such a check can reveal a lot about a person’s attitude towards work. Do they like their job or do they hate it? Also, you might find out that a candidate used to disclose confidential information on Facebook at their previous job. You don’t want to hire such a person, just as you wouldn’t like to employ someone who seems to have a drinking or drug problem.
While you’re at it, don’t forget to google the name of every candidate you’re considering and see what comes up, either positive or negative.
Obviously, these types of modern checks need to be used in addition to the traditional ones, those on a person’s educational background and employment history.
