5 Tips on Running a Background Check for Potential Employees

As a hiring manager, you’re going to have a lot of CVs to go through to choose and pick the candidate right for the job. That’s not an easy load on your shoulders,  and to help you make a sound decision you’ll want to carry out a background check on potential employees with CRB Direct. Most of the time, it’s a must to do for security reasons as well as making sure the person you are considering hiring is the person they say they are.

It’s not isolated cases where people can exaggerate on their CV to downright lie, so it’s crucial to understand this and take your precautions. Here are 5 tips to keep in mind when wanting to run a background employee checks.

1. Consent: As an employer, you have rights, but so does the employee. You should have written consent from an employee to do a background check. An employee has the right to know that such a check on them will be run. Keep in mind that in most states, the employee must give their consent, but there is no law that requires a company to run a background check.
2. Turnaround time: When it’s time to consider hiring someone, you want quick and reliable information because good employees might be hard to come by, especially for certain positions. This means using a reputable company that has been in the business long enough to perform an online people search which is quicker than hand searches carried out through courts, for instance.
3. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA): As long as you are hiring, you need to be more familiar with the rules and regulations of the FCRA, which is a federal law. The FCRA describes the kind of data that offices are allowed to collect. That includes some of the person’s aspects of financial history, including past loans, and current debts. It may also include employment information, present and previous addresses, whether they have ever filed for bankruptcy or owe child support. By the same token, FCRA may also limit who is allowed to see a credit report and under what circumstances.
4. Identify patterns: The best way to reach a conclusion is to look for negative and positive patterns in a person’s behavior. One mistake, of course, depending on what that mistake is, doesn’t necessarily identify the potential candidate. One bad or good deed shouldn’t be the deciding factor, but several bad acts in different areas of their life or in a single area could prove to be crucially important.
   

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5. 5. Keep checks consistent: Background checks should be run on all potential candidates, not just the ones you feel need a check. If you start singling out people or groups of people, such as any minority group, for background checks, you can easily get slammed with a lawsuit. Background checks social media personal assessment should be a practice of your company regardless of race, gender or color. Performing a federal warrant search can also provide further information on any potential candidate.

Look for the positive

Background checks are mainly used to spot the negative aspects of a person. But they can also spot the positive aspects. This helps a lot when trying to choose between the top two candidates for a job. If something negative pops up, there’s no harm to converse with the applicant about it if you want. You might want to open the doors of communication and let them explain themselves. In all cases, don’t run a background check on your own. A professional, experienced company will do a far better job than your own, limited background check.