The importance of selecting the right employees for your business

Know your potential employees with our employment background checks and employment screening services.

The process of hiring a candidate often takes a few months. Starting with a job advertisement, it proceeds to your HR personnel reviewing CVs, managers conducting interviews, and perhaps throwing in a couple of skill assessments. The whole hiring process has a single objective, which is to make sure that you have a clear picture of the individual before a job offer is made.

Why is employment screening important?

But no matter how impressed you are with a candidate, it is worth bearing in mind that your decision to hire them carries a level of risk, particularly in this day and age when it is said that 85% of job applicants lie on their CVs.

According to Monster.com, three of the most common lies job seekers tell are:

• Education embellishments
• Date deception
• Skill stretching

This is why background checks and employment screening services are important as they help to:

• Highlight any discrepancy between the CV and the actual story
• Give you a clear picture of who they are
• Fulfil due diligence
• Keep your company safe and safeguard your reputation
• Provide peace of mind
• Save you time and money

Essentially, you need background checks and employment screening services to help determine if a candidate is indeed right for your company. At Blackhawk Intelligence, we can help you by providing fast, accurate, and cost-effective screening services.

Employment investigations: using available and hard-to-find information to verify a candidate’s history

When clients call up our background checks and employment screening team for assistance, we often go through the following process to help them verify a candidate.

1. Using one’s digital footprint

Most people today have a digital footprint. What one says and does online, including the deleted ones, can be traced and added to their collection of digital footprint. An individual whose social media likes and preferences are also psychological data that can help a trained background check specialist to build a profile of the individual.

2. Verifying with past employers

A surprisingly large number of candidates today list their friends and ex-colleagues (instead of their past managers or employers) as references – this is a potential red flag and it is worth calling the past employers to verify the story, anything from employment period to issues at work.

3. Delving deeper

It may sound like a Hollywood movie, but candidates using another person’s identify do exist. There are many reasons why one would want to steal someone else’s identity – they may have a criminal background, a destructive employment history, or they may have entered the country illegally.

Regardless of why, they have chosen to steal someone’s name, use someone’s career history, set-up fake social media profiles, use fake government issued IDs – essentially pretend to be someone else. Sometimes the fraud is so extensive that the process of “verifying” the person with online information will not reveal the truth. This is when our background checks and employment screening experts have to delve a lot deeper to verify a person’s identity.

4. Conducting international search

In London, it is said that in a single tube carriage you can easily find people from a dozen countries during peak hours. The same is also true in many other global cities that attract talents from across the world.

The fact is that people do move around, from one city or one country to another. While it is great that we have a diverse workforce, cross-border background checks do pose some challenges. For example, criminal records and litigation checks may not be readily available in some countries.

In cases where cross-border background checks are required, we often rely on our investigative partners around the world to help find genuine, reliable information about an individual.

Background screening services

At Blackhawk, our comprehensive background checks and employment screening services can give you better insight into the suitability of a candidate. Our service is fast, accurate, confidential and cost-effective. And we will organise the information we obtained into a concise report for ease of use too.

Our services include but not limited to:

• Verifying educational qualifications
• Verifying previous employment
• Checking for a criminal record
• Reviewing social media and internet activity
• Litigation checks
• Identifying any ‘red flags’
• Analysing potential corporate affiliations
• Conducting enquiries into a candidate’s personal and professional reputation

The last point is important because it helps to weed out risky candidates, particularly if the information provided are from former employers and other reliably-placed sources.

Trust Blackhawk to help you choose the right employees

At Blackhawk Intelligence, our background checks and employment screening services save you time, money, and potential stress that can come with hiring the wrong person. By verifying a candidate carefully, you also reduce the risk of employee fraud, employee theft, or employment disputes. To find out how you can benefit from our background screening service, call us today on +44 (0)20 8108 9317.

If you found this article useful, take a look at:

• A useful guide to internal corporate investigation
• How can asset tracing help fraud victims
• Catch fraudsters red-handed with forensic accounting

This post is intended to provide information of general interest about current business issues. It should not replace professional advice tailored to your specific circumstances.