Upgrade Your Employment Screening Process Without Breaking Your Budget

Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room:

It’s not only possible, but it’s downright EASY to hire someone to carry out bare-minimum background checks on potential employees. There are plenty of companies that are willing and able to scratch the surface on your behalf and hand you a sheet of paper that says, “this person seems fine.” While this may satisfy legal and regulatory requirements initially, these minimal screens leave your company at risk.

If you truly care about your company’s reputation, the morale of your team, and their long-term success, you probably already realize that the bare minimum background check isn’t enough.

At the same time, ordering the maximum level search for every employee rarely makes good business sense. It’s going to be the most costly option, it’s likely to take a long time, and there are also legal considerations for unnecessarily invasive background checks.

Since getting quick results, controlling costs, and staying compliant are all valid needs as well, how can a smart business owner strike the necessary balance between settling for inadequate background check services and what could be overkill?

Understanding your priorities

The first key to resolving this issue is to fully understand your employee screening priorities. This isn’t necessarily going to be a blanket set of requirements for every search, but will more likely need to be considered for each position and reviewed periodically as positions evolve.

This makes sense since different positions – even at the same location – can have very different roles, some of which may require a more comprehensive background screening than others.

For instance, a retail store may have two open positions available: one working as a salesperson on the floor and one working as a stocker in the warehouse. Since the salesperson is going to have direct contact with customers – including children – it makes sense to do a more thorough screening to ensure there’s no reason to be concerned about that individual’s interactions with your customers.

Without question, when determining the extent of your employee screening process for a given position, your top priorities should be:

1. Safety (your customers and your employees)
2. Company reputation
3. Cost of the screening
4. Time the screening takes

If you choose to place lower costs or faster results at the top of the list, you’re automatically putting your company’s reputation and the safety of your employees and customers at risk.

Work with the right screening partner

Once you have your employee screening priorities established for every position, the only other decision you’ll need to make is choosing the right background screening company to work with.

Obviously, it makes no sense to carefully determine what level of background checks are needed for each position in your company and then abruptly hand over responsibility for employee screening to a company offering a one-size-fits-all solution. What you need at this point is an experienced, qualified background screening company that understands and appreciates each position’s unique requirements, and that’s willing to customize their screening approach based on your established priorities.

Identifying and partnering with that kind of company is the key to getting the very best screening services available without destroying your hiring budget with needlessly comprehensive search packages. If your employment screening partner is willing and able to customize each project to the priorities and requirements you’ve established for every position, you’ll always get all the information you need from the background check, and you’ll never pay for searches you don’t need.

If you’re fortunate enough to find that perfect screening partner, an even better option is to work with them in determining what all those requirements and priorities are in the first place. As experts in the field, they’ll no doubt have plenty of helpful insight that can fine-tune the customization process even more and add more value along the way.

If you’re able to implement that kind of optimal employee background checking system, you’ll find your hiring process becomes faster, easier, and far more profitable as a result.

SPECIAL NOTE: In case it wasn’t incredibly obvious, NationSearch IS that optimal employee screening partner. Contact us and we’ll prove it to you.