Best Practices for Background Checks
Establishing best practices for your company’s background checks streamlines hiring and workforce management. Or does it?
Adhering to best practices for employee background checks can keep your business out of trouble caused by personnel issues. But, there’s more to doing background checks than screening for and maintaining a workforce that’s based on truthful representation and skilled to meet their job descriptions.
While “best practices” are essential, when it comes to background checks, your business’s guidelines could potentially cover an overwhelming amount of information. In fact, background screening processes could generate so much work—and require enough subject matter expertise—that you’d need an entire department devoted to them.
In general, professional background checks include the screening of a person’s credit history, criminal record, driving history, drug use, educational background, professional licensures/certifications, social media presence, work history, and possibly more. That’s an enormous amount of information to gather, review, and align with your business needs. You’ll need to make sure you’re protecting that information with modern-day security standards like those set forth in the ISO 27001 family. And that’s not all you need to consider.
As state and local governments begin to ban salary history requests, regulate questions about criminal histories, and update marijuana laws, you’ll have to align the best practices of your background checks to comply with the constantly-changing legal requirements that will vary across cities, counties, and states. Plus, if your workforce is international, you’ll have to add the legal requirements of other nations to that list. And, depending on the nature of your business, you may need to understand legal code that’s specific to your industry, too.
So, what’s the best way to establish and maintain your company’s best practices for background checks? Hire the experts to guide you. Make ClearStar your best practice. Our experts can efficiently gather information directly from your employees, and help ensure your program is in compliance with the most up-to-date legal regulations so your business can do what it was intended to do.
