Pre-employment screening is the norm, with four background check types growing in popularity.
Employers are becoming more mindful about how candidates can affect the culture and reputation of their organisations and are using pre-employment screening to identify those who aren’t the right fit.
Organisations will perform criminal history background checks and social media checks to mitigate their people risks, and will increasingly use technology to confirm candidates’ identities remotely and check references as a way of streamlining their processes.
Criminal History Background Checks
In 2016, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) processed about 4.3 million Nationally Coordinated Criminal History Checks (NCCHC), compared to just one million in 2004. We’re confident that this trend of pre-emplying screening isn’t going to slow down.
Organisations are performing more criminal history background checks because they want to ensure they aren’t hiring someone who will negatively impact their reputation. In the past, healthcare, mining and financial organisations were the ones most likely to check candidates’ histories, but they’ve been joined by a lot of fast food, retail, manufacturing, and small business employers. An NCCHC is the norm in pre-employment screening.
Identity Verification
Using technology to verify candidates’ identities is becoming a big trend, particularly among organisations that engage contingent workers.
As recent as a couple of years ago, employers would verify identities by requiring applicants to personally attend the workplace to show their ID and hand in certified documents. But with more contractors and on-demand workers, and more people working remotely, it’s a bit of a challenge to verify a person’s identity with those traditional means, and therefore facial recognition screening is being used a lot more than in the past.
This type of screening involves technology taking a photo of a candidates’ face and using algorithms to match the photo with a supplied image. Airlines in the US, for example, use this technology to identify people who fly with them.
Social Media Checks
Organisations will search applicants’ LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, for example, to identify their potential soft skills, social activities, what “groups” they’re part of, and the tone they use in their posts, to determine if they would be the right fit for the workplace.
These types of checks, however, can raise some complications because of privacy legislation, and he warns organisations to be careful in how they use candidates’ data. This is where a third-party vendor can come in handy.
Reference Checks
Employers are quickly embracing technology to check candidates’ references because of how tedious the manual process can be.
Some of the pain points of checking references in more traditional ways include questioning the validity of the reference (as candidates might put down a relative or friend), and the manual administration work that the process entails.
Companies can now use software to automate the process, which can mean that instead of having to contact referees, who might be busy at the time, the referee will fill out a survey online, or receive an email or text message asking them to contact the employer when they are free to provide a reference.
