Are your potential employees hiding a past that includes crime, firings, or a social media presence that could damage your brand reputation? Are your background checks uncovering what they’re hiding?
How Potential Employees Try to Hide Their Pasts from Background Checks
Many potential employees have something in their background they’d like to forget. It’s not uncommon to have an ambiguous job tenure because of personality conflict, a court or criminal record due to a one-time indiscretion, or slightly embarrassing things on social media. And, most employment consultants and placement agencies will tell their candidates to be honest if things from their past may raise a red flag for a potential employer. But what about the job candidates who really do have something serious to hide? They will go to great lengths to keep a background check from discovering it.
Hiding Social Media from a Background Check
Social media accounts are the easiest way for employers to learn about a potential employee’s personality, family, friends, and interests outside of work. Hopefully, rummaging through a candidate’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat feeds uncovers mostly benign activity. But, did you know your candidate may have multiple handles created specifically to throw off potential employers? The handle your background check uncovers may be squeaky clean and also a deterrent from the one that includes bullying behavior towards others or photos of indecent behavior at parties and public events all over town.
Hiding Criminal Behavior from a Background Check
Potential employees will have the most difficult time trying to hide public records like court documents, arrests, and criminal charges but they will go to great lengths to try to do it. Shady attorneys and online companies make good money trying to digitally erase transgressions for these kinds of candidates. Candidates may also use intentional misspellings, incorrect phone numbers, or slightly altered names to create confusion on their background check in hopes you won’t bother to dig deeper.
Hiding At-Fault Terminations from a Background Check
Depending on the type and length of an candidate’s work history, it can be fairly easy to cover up a firing. A job candidate may fudge their start and end dates for a position, provide a fake reference for the former employer, or just not mention that place of employment at all. If your application and hiring processes aren’t well-coordinated, it can be very easy for a bad candidate to slip through using those simple tactics in hopes, again, that you won’t bother to dig deeper for the real story.
Finding Out the Truth About Your Potential Employees
It seems like today’s digital communications and internet connectivity would make it easier than ever to research a potential employee’s past. But, unless you’re taking a fine-toothed comb through the results of your background checks, it’s easy to miss some serious red flags. Cross-referencing reports, comparing a variety of sources, and simply digging beyond the social media handles a candidate gives to you are just some of the ways well-trained and experienced background check services work to find out who you’re really hiring.
Instead of running your candidates through a quick and easy background screen and hoping for the best, contact ClearStar to help you hire the best of the best from your pool of potential employees.
