3 Reasons Why Re-Screening Employees Is A Must

Most employers already know the absolute importance of running pre-employment background checks. Seasoned hiring officers are familiar with the shocking statistics that over 51% of all resumes, applications, and references provided by applicants contain inaccurate information, that over 7% of all applicants have a criminal record within the last seven years, and that 30% of all business failures are due to employee theft and other types of employee dishonesty. This isn’t new information for most businesses.

However, many employers forget about an equally critical step in maintaining safe hiring processes: re-screening current employees. Studies show that less than one-third of businesses re-screen their current employees, and only 39% of businesses perform secondary background screens on current employees who have had a status change, whether horizontally or vertically within the organization.

But why is re-screening current employees so important? Tracepoint has three very important reasons that every business needs to consider:

1. Protecting Client Safety. This reason is twofold. Running a pre-employment background screen to check for criminal history is a good start, but if you don’t perform regular or recurring screens how can you be sure that your employees haven’t incurred recent criminal charges? You could be unknowingly trusting your business assets, your company’s reputation, and the safety of your clients and other employees with individuals who have serious criminal records. Secondly, with security breaches and database hacks occurring more and more frequently, you need to ensure that your company’s sensitive data is in the safest, most trustworthy hands possible. We recommend that whenever you have a current employee whom you are considering moving horizontally or vertically within your organization into higher levels of management or with access to clients’ PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and/or company proprietary information, you should conduct a secondary background check to make sure that the employee has a clean record and can be trusted to protect sensitive data. This is a basic step in protecting your clients and your business.

1. Protecting Employee Safety. Maintaining workplace safety is your responsibility as a business owner. As mentioned earlier, you may have an employee who had a clean record when hired but has since incurred serious criminal convictions. In order to protect the safety of your other employees, it is a good idea to run recurring re-screens on current employees to ensure that your workplace is a safe, comfortable, and non-violent environment. If a violent incident occurs at your workplace, you could be held liable for failing to carry out best practices in terms of workplace safety. Many industries have guidelines and suggestions for how often employers should re-screen employees and which positions are considered sensitive or high-risk and need to be screened more often. Recent lawsuits have shown that judges can go either way when deciding how much responsibility falls on the employer to screen and re-screen employees in ensuring workplace safety.

1. Building Strong Reputation and Market Brand. When you have taken steps to implement best practices for safe hiring and maintaining workplace safety, you can include these practices in your marketing campaigns to emphasize your commitment to client and employee safety. This marketing strategy will set your company apart by helping to increase your market share and protecting that market share from competitors, minimizing your liability to data breaches and legal action, and generating positive publicity for your business.

While protecting clients, protecting employees, and building your brand are the three biggest reasons to implement re-screening practices, there are many other equally important reasons as well. If you have any questions about re-screening or best practices in your industry, contact Tracepoint for more information.