It’s no secret that background checks help your hiring team. They provide a last layer of security to protect your organization from negligent hiring and other problems. But a good background check provider goes beyond that.
Here are all the expected and unexpected ways background checks can benefit your North American hiring team.
Why Companies Do Background Checks
Take it from us, background checks and verifications can help your company in a few fundamental ways:
- Criminal record checks help your company protect itself against negligent hiring claims
- Education verification checks make sure that candidates have the education they claim to have (which is worth checking because more people lie on their resumes than you might think)
- Credential verifications ensure that candidates have the professional designations they need to perform the job effectively (and so you can stay compliant in regulated industries!)
- Employment verifications double-check a candidate’s work history to ensure the timelines line up
- ID verification checks ensure that candidates are who they claim to be, and are not fraud attempts (an especially handy benefit for remote-first companies)
- Driving record checks make sure that candidates applying for a position that requires driving/hitting the open road are qualified to do so
In short, background checks and screening services give you that added level of certainty that the new hires you bring onboard are qualified individuals you can trust.
Other Ways a Good Background Check Provider Benefits HR
Beyond the results of the background checks, how your service provider conducts pre-employment screening and how quickly the results are returned also has an impact on your HR department.
Free Up Your HR Department’s Time with an Easy-to-Use Solution
Your HR department works hard and has more than a few things on its plate. So any tool that helps streamline processes and frees up time gives them the opportunity to allocate precious resources to something else.
That’s why it’s useful to use a background check provider that offers:
- an easy-to-use platform
- easy admin and quick setup
- excellent customer service
These benefits save time. With a good background check provider, your team doesn’t have to waste time and energy collecting forms from candidates and passing them back and forth. An easier platform can also lead to higher user adoption (we know this from experience) and make it easier to train new staff on how to request background checks. As a result, your team can be even more efficient and have more room to focus on other initiatives.
Hire Faster – Meeting Your Time to Hire Metrics
Many hiring managers feel intense pressure to fills roles quickly. This can affect the kind of decisions they make when bringing on a new employee. In some cases, it might even lead them to ignore obvious red flags and bring on a bad hire.
Streamlining the recruiting process helps make it easier to hire under pressure. A service provider that offers easy integration with your favourite hiring platform helps to put everything in one place so that your department doesn’t have to waste time toggling between applications. And when reminders can be sent to candidates automatically and results come back quickly, you can get candidates in the door faster—without accidentally sacrificing quality.
Improving Your Pre-boarding and Onboarding Process
It’s no secret that the pre-boarding and onboarding experience has a pretty big impact on employee satisfaction and retention. According to one study, “69 percent of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding.” So how do background checks affect this? Well, little frustrations can add up and affect how a new employee perceives your organization.
Let’s compare two different scenarios. In one, your candidate receives a prompt to complete their background check (perhaps even white labeled with your brand). They open it and within just a few clicks, they’re able to complete their check right from their smartphone and carry on with their day.
In another scenario, your candidate also receives a prompt to complete their background check. This time, however, they’re met with walls of text, confusing requests for various documents, multiple questions that seem to ask for the same thing, and a customer service team that is difficult to access. They need to rifle through their tax files, answer several emails, and spend a few hours over the span of a couple of days completing the process. They still complete their background check, but they do so feeling more than a little frustrated.
If your new employee then has several other confusing (or great) experiences, it could begin to shape how they perceive your work environment and determine how long they want to stay there. Sure, it’s a small detail, but it’s one that can easily be fixed.
Conclusion—Your Background Check Provider Matters
The value that background checks provide comes in expected and unexpected ways. The results matter and the outcome of the results are important, like their ability to protect your company from negligent hiring cases. But the background check provider you choose can also help you save time, streamline your processes, and make things just a little nicer for your new employees.
Want to see it all for yourself? Book a demo and see just how easy it is to send your background checks with Certn.
