by Jason Morris

President Bush has established a new council and two new positions to create governmentwide standards for checking the backgrounds of government employees and contractors.

An executive order issued June 30 established the Suitability and Security Clearance Performance Accountability Council. The council will review procedures for investigating and ruling on whether a person should be allowed access to sensitive information or federally controlled buildings. The goal is to standardize those procedures governmentwide, the order states.

The council will also establish requirements for an information technology infrastructure that can help agencies with background checks and will oversee development of that infrastructure, the order states.

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by Natalie Beck

Bet you can’t guess what this article states as the number one way to reduce employee theft!

On second thought, if you are reading our blog, maybe you can.

Steps to Reduce Employee Theft

By Keith Mcrae, Southtown Star - June 11, 2008

That’s a large number, and it’s on the rise. The present economy increases the chances of internal theft because more people are in desperate need of extra cash. Internal theft dwarfs the losses of external theft.

What can businesses do to protect themselves?

No. 1 is to perform thorough background checks, which should include criminal and credit history, education verification and reference checks. Too often the hiring process is hastily conducted. Sometimes you are in desperate need of someone and take shortcuts in hiring.

It is critical when bringing a new person into your organization that you are proactive and not reactive. Forecast your hiring needs, and give yourself time to hire the right person. Not offering someone a job is much easier then hiring a person and then having to get rid of them. If possible, drug testing should be done on all new employees.

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by Natalie Beck

Security precautions in the Canadian retail market are on the rise according to a new study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Retail Council of Canada. More and more retail stores are employing the use of video surveillance and alarms in their stores in addition to strategically placing more employees on the floor to spot those who suffer from the “sticky finger syndrome.” These measures are being utilized to combat both internal and external theft.

I was a little disappointed to see only a sentence or two about conducting background checks on store employees as the study indicates that 33% of retail theft results from inside jobs. Of course, I understand that that wasn’t the intent of the article written about this study but if retail employers want to decrease the instances of theft in the workplace, it is important that they have information on what constitutes a good background check on a employee. You cannot go wrong with an address history search coupled with a comprehensive criminal records check. Throw a credit report into the mix if the person will be handling money. And don’t forget the sex offender registry search if your employee will be working closely with the public (especially children). Depending on the job type and/or job responsibility, there are always additional services you can add. Retail employers should want to make sure that the person they are hiring does not have theft conviction in their past. If 100% of retailers conducted comprehensive background checks on all of their employees (and not just the 48% that stated in this survey they conduct a criminal check before they hire a new employee), I’d bet you’d see the percentage of employee thefts drop considerably.

Click here to read the article

by Nick Fishman

Good friend Barry Nixon from the National Institute of Workplace Violence and Kim Kerr from Lexis Nexis (yes, a competitor albeit one who crafted a great web post) just wrote a great article that was published by HR.BLR.com about how to develop a background screening policy for your organization. Readers of this blog might recall the Kim and Barry were kind enough to include a chapter on International Background Screening that was written by employeescreenIQ in their recent book Background Screening and Investigations: Managing Hiring Risk from the HR and Security Perspectives. Please see the lists they developed for implementing a policy and the resulting benefits.

Benefits of Implementing a Background Screening Policy

1. Proactive Management of Risk: Risk management is fundamentally about choosing to accept a risk, mitigating the risk, or reducing the risk, and a background screening policy is a clear step to reduce the organization’s risk.
2. Due Diligence and Legal Compliance: A well-crafted background screening policy will position an organization to exercise due diligence, which ultimately will help it avoid the negative consequences of being out of compliance or breaking the law. This helps the organization avoid unnecessary cost and the distraction of resources to address legal issues.
3. Improve Hiring Processes: Background screening provides for the collection of relevant information and verification of the accuracy of the information, which helps an organization to be equipped to make better hiring decisions.
4. Protection of Information: One of the side benefits of implementing an effective background screening policy is that it forces an organization to pay close attention to how it protects individuals’ personal information, which ultimately reduces the likelihood of the organization having a breach in its data and all of the commensurate problems associated with it.
5. Reduce Cost and Improve Profitability: An organization that proactively manages its risk, avoids costly employee problems and lawsuits, has an efficient hiring process, and protects individual personal data will reduce its cost of operations, thus improving the flow of dollars to the bottom line.

Read the full post here . . .post

by Nick Fishman

I just read an article out of the Edmonton Sun about a city bus company that hired a driver through a contractor.  The driver subsequently was terminated and is sure to be prosecuted for molesting a child.  It turns out that the contractor never performed a background check.  (See full story)

This is a horribly regrettable situation, but hardly one that isn’t being repeated every single day.  Employers are forgetting to ensure that their contracted employees are being screened and if they are, they are not asking how and when they are being screened.

I just wrote an article about this exact topic and invite you to read it.

My Contractor Said They Performed a Background Check

by Jason Morris

I think this article is relevant because in many ways interviews are a way of vetting employees. Last week I attended the Recruiting Roadshow and Joel Cheesman of Cheezhead.com gave a great commentary on video resumes. Interestingly enough, he also showed a parody done by “The Daily Show” about the subject. Normally this is not a forum for comedy but I believe its a great way to show you the benefits and the liability of this new medium. First however, read the following article, then watch the video:

InterviewStudio Webinar Discusses Legal Considerations of Video Interviews and Resumes

Thursday May 8, 2008

Bellevue, Wash. — May 8
InterviewStudio, a new rich media platform used for the initial interview of a job candidate, has just made available its latest Webinar, “To Video or Not To Video: The Social and Legal Considerations of Video Interviews and Video Resumes.” The Webinar features legal views and perspectives from the EEOC, a private-practice law firm, and recruiting industry experts.

Though controversial, the video has arrived on the hiring scene, and employers and recruiters must now determine how they will use video interviews or resumes in their applicant-screening process while staying within the guidelines set forth by the EEOC and OFCCP.

InterviewStudio’s Webinar, “To Video or Not To Video,” presents employers and recruiters with the latest information they need regarding video usage in the screening process, with the EEOC’s views presented by an assistant legal counsel; practical advice on video risk management from Summit Law Group, a private practice firm based in Seattle; and an industry perspective from Colleen Aylward, a 16-year leader in the applicant screening market.

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by Natalie Beck

Looks like quite few people didn’t do a background check on the best way to conduct a background check. (Maybe that statement was overkill, but after reading this article, you’ll understand why I couldn’t resist!). This article talks about how one company had no way of knowing that their employee had out-of-state warrants and the limitations of Massachusetts CORI (Criminal Offender Record Information) system, MA’s statewide database of criminal records information. employeescreenIQ, as well as many other outlets, have stated time and time again that statewide databases are notorious for having incomplete, inaccurate, and outdated criminal record information and should never be used as a sole criminal records source for companies looking to obtain a comprehensive background check on their prospective employees. Also, companies should be conducting criminal records checks in states other than the applicant’s current state of residence or just the state the company is headquartered in. Unfortunately, this message has not reached everyone’s ears and that is why we end up with situations like those described in this article.

This company could have potentially located this person’s out-of-state warrants and other possible criminal activity in his past by running a Social Security Number Trace, obtaining his address history, and running a criminal records check in every county he has lived in in the past 7-10 years. The company could have topped this off by running statewide and national searches in order to locate any records that may have appeared in places other than where he lived (this would have been our recommendation since the nature of the position this person had required that he travel without setting down a permanent residence that would have been detected by the SSN trace). This would probably be a bit pricey, but sure beats the cost of a negligent hiring lawsuit. I believe the author of this article could have done this story more justice by doing a little research on how companies can conduct a comprehensive background check and possibly save another company from having the same misconceptions.

Click here for the article

by Nick Fishman

Diploma Mills are on the rise and chances are you’ve seen them used on the resumes’ of job candidates you have considered for employment. The question is whether you caught it our not. The Federal Trade Commission has published a helpful tool for employers to consult in order to combat fake degrees when performing Education Verifications:

Avoid Fake-Degree Burns By Researching Academic Credentials

Helpful Details Include the Following:
You can use the Internet to check if a school is accredited by a legitimate organization at a new database of accredited academic institutions, posted by the U.S. Department of Education at www.ope.ed.gov/accreditation. (There are a few legitimate institutions that have not pursued accreditation.)

To find out if an accrediting agency is legitimate, check the list of recognized national and regional accrediting agencies maintained by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation at www.chea.org.

by Jason Morris

I noticed a good article today on yahoo’s hotjobs site. Desperation Will Doom Your Job Search focuses on what not to do when sending and creating a resume. While most of our articles focus on employment screening, background checks, identity theft and other HR related topics, I felt this was a good opportunity to speak to a different audience, the candidate.

The first tip the article lends to the reader is of course to be truthful, don’t lie or fabricate your resume. Most companies will conduct a background check and uncover an untruths you may have lent to your resume. Read this article to see the other three tips it lends to job seekers!

by Nick Fishman

The President of Washington-based Dollarwise payday stores, Charles Seil was operating his business from a prison cell over the summer. A pretty cool trick if you ask me, but the State of Washington didn’t think so when it found out after the fact. In fact, they revoked his license after getting an anonymous tip that he plead guilty to watercraft homicide and had been serving time.

Now, Mr. Seil was not an employee of his company so I doubt he would have instructed his people to run recurring background checks on him to allow for continuous employment, however if the state, which issued his license didn’t get this anonymous tip he’d still be operating his business. What could the state have done?

We’ve written much about the concept of Continuous or Recurring Background Checks recently:

Background Checks for Current Employees

Well, they did perform a background check to issue the license. However, that background check was conducted well before this incident took place. If the had a program in place to update the information, they could have caught this.

The same concept applies to any employer. It’s great that so many organizations see the value in conducting background checks in order to make an informed hiring decision. But, that check doesn’t guarantee that something hasn’t happen since the time that the applicant hired.

Check out the links above for some suggestions on how to effectively screen your current employees.