Seeing Through the Fraud with Employment Screening

Employers have become quite used to the phenomenon of finding a prospective employee’s work experience remarkably stellar and then finding the name or Social Security number to be a sham. The reasons for the bogus application information can range from fraudulent intentions to hiding a criminal past. Nowadays, the use of employment screening during the hiring process is a common practice. Employers now want to be doubly sure that the person they are hiring is actually who they say they are. Without employment screening, unscrupulous fraudsters could continue to cost companies billions per year. Fortunately, sophisticated screening systems continue to emerge each year making it harder for con artists to carry out their scams.

It is not uncommon for companies to hire a secondary service to perform these examinations. An employment screening must be performed using methods that are not only thorough but ethical and legal. These service providers may go even further by providing drug screening also. By discovering the discrepancies, a company can be sure they are hiring a worthy candidate and not some one who will cost the company in both time and money. This in turn ensures a workforce maintains a consistent level of effectiveness. Companies that use employment screening are less likely to have problems with safety concerns or workplace violence.

In most of the larger corporations, employment screening is carried out by trained individuals in a human resources department. Some companies sell their screening systems and educate company employees on how to effectively use the system’s various features. Companies who buy these screening systems are typically those that work with extremely sensitive data or large amounts of money or other currency. These environments demand high levels of security and require more than a basic background check. While the cost of screening programs can vary, employment screening is never as expensive as the loss that occurs with a dreadful hiring mistake.

Sometimes it is just an individual who needs to conduct a screening on a nanny or an in home contractor. Luckily, the advent of the internet has made even this type of employment screening rather easy. With the ability to connect worldwide in the blink of an eye, finding specific types of information on an individual requires very little effort. There are several databases that are generally known for holding basic information about a person. Using these, one can make sure the main points of a background are accurate. For more extensive background checks a combination of online information and a private investigator are sometimes used. Private investigators can interview acquaintances, old coworkers or family members.