The number of people working remotely has increased by 140% since 2005. With growing technologies and the increasing volume of work accomplished at any location, remote working has become a win-win for employers and employees. When covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, organizations had to quickly embrace remote working lest they shipped out. Post covid, a good number of employees are hesitant to heed the return-to-office policies of their organizations. As such, companies have had to reach a compromise with their employees to work remotely, with some organizations proposing a hybrid work model. Whatever the case, by now, we all agree that remote work is here to stay. Many employees have discovered that they prefer working remotely – at least most of the time. On the other hand, employers have realized they can benefit significantly – a more engaged staff, access to a global talent pool, and reduced office overhead.
That said, companies that have fully or partially embraced remote working must engage in activities that make remote working as effective, efficient, and productive as possible. One important thing a company should do is perform background checks on its remote employees. The management may never meet their new employees in person, explaining why background checks remain an essential element in the hiring process. As a matter of fact, background checks could be more important in the modern work arena than before. This post considers a candidate’s background checks and what employers need to know when conducting background checks for remote employees.
What Is A Background Check For Employees?
It is a process a person or organization utilizes to confirm a person’s criminal record, employment history, education, and other past activities to ascertain their validity and make informed decisions. A background check reveals if a prospective employee has vehicular violations, criminal convictions, or work/educational misrepresentation experiences. It is an important process for all employees, including remote workers.
How do they work?
The process begins with verifying a prospective employee’s identity according to their provided information – including birth date and social security number. The next step entails conducting searches using various public databases and court records guided by the type of information the employer is interested in finding. In some instances, the publicly available databases might not be sufficient. An organization might require the services of a specialist who can manually contact the previous employers of the prospective employee and other organizations, such as institutions of learning where the applicant has passed.
As mentioned earlier, a background check can reveal an array of information about the past of a job applicant relative to their credit report, criminal history, education, work history, and many more. Since there are many forms of checks at the disposal of employers, the information that shows up on a background check varies according to the nature of searches the employer chooses to perform. A background check type usually depends on the position a candidate is being considered for and the information needed to inform the hiring decision. Therefore, the employer and the job candidate must understand the information included in every background check and how the information can be utilized.
Let’s consider a few common background checks performed by employers:
- Criminal History Background Checks
When performing a criminal background check, an employer may decide to search national, federal, state, and county databases. One may also search the watchlists and sex offender registries to obtain insight into a job applicant’s criminal history. A criminal background check determines if a job candidate has been convicted or charged with a crime. An employer can accomplish this search into ways:
- Name-based criminal record checks
Using a person’s name and birth date is the most common approach to checking a candidate’s criminal history. A name-based criminal check entails checking against the Canadian Police Information Center system of RCMP. The search entails a check of the National Repository of Criminal Records (NRCR) based on the candidate’s name and birth date. Th process may also entail a search of the local and national databases. One of the downsides of using name-based checks is the difficulty in verifying a candidate’s identity because of some similar last names, spelling differences, nickname usage, and changes in legal names. In some instances, some people change names intentionally to avoid a criminal history record.
- Certified criminal checks
Sometimes, a name-based criminal check may fail to offer a definite way of ascertaining a person’s identity. In such cases, the officials may request the candidate to provide fingerprints where the search now becomes a certified criminal record check. In case the job candidate is among the few people whose fingerprints cannot be processed electronically, the police service usually submits a paper copy of their fingerprints. Application of fingerprints for criminal history background checks must be based on informed consent, and it entails sharing the outcome of the information with a third party named by the job candidate on the application form. The job candidate’s fingerprint provided to the relevant officials is only used for criminal history background checks to confirm the job applicant’s identity. The fingerprints aren’t added to the database subject for search.
- Work|Employment History Background Checks
Part of some employers’ pre-employment screening is employment verification, popularly known as a work history background check or employment background check. It is usually used to confirm the authenticity of a candidate’s information. It also helps to ensure that their skills and experience match what they’ve provided in their application to ensure that they satisfy the requirements of the position. The employer contacts the candidate’s current or previous employers directly to verify their employment details, including employment data – beginning and end dates – and job titles.
- Education Background Checks
It’s sometimes referred to as education history checks. It entails the verification of the educational experiences of the job candidate in high schools, vocational schools, colleges, and universities. The process involves contacting the academic institutions the candidate has provided on their applications to confirm enrolment, attendance dates, type of certificate, degree obtained, major completion status, and graduation date.
- Driving Records Background Checks
Some positions may require an employee to operate a motor vehicle or any other machinery making it important for the employer to review the driving records and public safety of the candidate. At times, it’s a requirement the employer must fulfil to maintain safety protocols and reduce risk. The driving record check, which is sometimes called the MVR report, entails the search of the state’s department of motor vehicles – or a similar entity – and may comprise the following:
- The status of the driver’s license – is it valid, expired, or suspended?
- Class – is it comercial, operator e.t.c
- If there are any felony or misdemeanor convictions, e.g., DWI or DUI.
- If there are any moving suspensions, violations, or restrictions.
If an employer wishes to access the credit report of a candidate, or other sensitive records such as the school transcripts, the candidate must grant consent. Another background check employers conduct entails checking the online presence of prospective employees by asking for their social media handles.
Depending on the position the candidate is being considered for, an employer may be interested in performing a credit check. A credit check enables the employer to verify trivial details about a job candidate, such as their full name, contact details, and address. A credit check may also help the employer determine how responsible a candidate is when it comes to money. Credit checks are important, especially if someone has applied for a finance position or any other money-handling post.
An employer may also want to conduct a social security verification. They mostly do so to confirm if a job candidate is being truthful about their identity and if they are allowed to work within the country. A social security verification may be done through the social security administration.
Drug testing is yet another that some employers – especially those looking for remote workers – may be interested in performing. Drug testing is particularly important when an employer wants to be sure that the employee will be productive in their role while working remotely. Employers also conduct drug testing when they are concerned about employee turnover rates. They want to be sure that the selected candidate will be in the company in the long haul to curb the costs associated with high staff turnover.
These are some of the background checks an employer can perform on a prospective employee – remote or in-person to ascertain their eligibility for the position. The basic information an employer requires to run a candidate’s background check is their full name, birth date, and social security number.
What is the Importance of Conducting Background Checks for remote workers?
When hiring a person, you intend to trust them with important company information – private and secret information. Such trust levels are usually elevated when it involves remote working. A company might send a candidate an office computer and supply them with passwords to sensitive information. It’s important to be certain that you are dealing with someone you can trust with such critical information.
Remote workers pose a security threat not seen in an office environment. The same technologies that allow remote working also provide new hires access to proprietary company and client information. Just because a person is working from the comfort of their home office or coffee shop doesn’t give them the right to forget the security precautionary measures of the company’s physical office.
Background checks have proved to enhance workplace safety. By 2018, workplace fraud had risen to 21% – double the figure in 2022. By doing adequate background checks, you help the organization minimize workplace fraud which could be too costly for the organization.
Besides mitigating the negative effects of a bad hire, performing background checks helps an organization comply with state and federal regulations. While it depends on the industry a business operates and the position being filled, a company or management may utilize background checks to show that it performed due diligence. A company must ensure proper record keeping, and its responsibility is to prove its compliance with regulatory standards to avoid losing its reputation and credentials.
Therefore, it is the responsibility of the hiring managers and their support team to safeguard the company against anyone who poses a threat. As such, criminal convictions, education history, motor vehicle records, employment history, and other forms of background checks are vital before the hiring process ends. The employer should conduct background checks for all the same reasons they perform in-office background checks. The hiring manager owes it to the organization and their fellow remote workers to settle on someone truthful with a backed-up resume.
Things To Know About Background Checks For Remote Work Employees
- A Bad Hire Can Lead To Costly Losses
A bad hire – irrespective of whether remote-based or in-office – will ultimately hurt an employer’s bottom line. An organization that onboards a remote employee without thoroughly and properly checking their background risks costly consequences. Your organization could lose the money spent during onboarding and training, high turnover costs, and potential consequences of negligent hiring practices. Therefore, an organization should properly vet all prospective remote working candidates before hiring and onboarding a new team member.
Some of the consequences associated with a bad hire include the following:
- Financial impact – a wrong hire can cost a company thousands of dollars through increased turnover, lost productivity, and wasted financial resources on training.
- Productivity loss – hiring a wrong fit for the position means the new hire cannot perform their job properly. This may result in decreased productivity, which causes an enterprise to miss deadlines and fail to accomplish its goals. In turn, other employees, including the managers, will be forced to handle larger workloads, ultimately lowering company productivity. When an organization consistently suffers decreased productivity, its profitability and growth also suffer. Employee morale goes down, and the cycle continues, and if a company continues to ignore these happenings, it eventually loses clients, reputation, and competitiveness.
- Company culture – today, organizational culture is more important than ever. It is the number one reason many employees choose a given company over many others. Hiring a remote worker whose beliefs dont match the company culture can negatively affect everyone – especially those with a negative attitude toward a team.
- Reputation and legal issues – a bad hire can negatively interfere with the clients-company relationships, especially if they have direct contact with clients. Ruined relationships with clients are costly. An organization can lose thousands or millions of dollars on lost contracts and reduced sales. Apart from causing a bad company reputation, a wrong hire can also put a company into legal issues, especially if they engage in illegal activities.
To prevent such costly changes, the hiring manager and his team should do everything possible to ensure they’ve conducted various background checks. By so doing, they will be sure that the candidate they choose ultimately is the best fit for the position under consideration and cannot harm the organization because they’ve got their stuff altogether and thus ready and able to diligently perform their duties and responsibilities to help the organization realize its goals and objectives.
- Understand That Remote Employees Pose A Unique Risk
Conducting thorough background checks on remote employees ensures that the company or hiring manager properly identifies people capable of having a lot of information at their fingertips. Once these people become part of a remote team, they will have access to all enterprise data, including client information.
When remote employee access this data, they will most likely be doing so from their own computer and network, which is a game changer from the security perspective. Therefore, their access to this information increases the chances of information breaches or leaks. Therefore, an organization must perform background checks to be sure of the person they will be entrusting all forms of company information – some of which are secret and private.
- Leverage Technology
Since remote working is still gaining roots, some companies still wonder how best to complete background checks for remote employees. Even if onboarding happens remotely, the process and background checks need not be a headache. Over the years, online technology has evolved significantly to allow employers to accomplish all the relevant processes remotely.
For instance, the human resource staff and recruiters can send the job applicants a secure link to fill out all the required information and paperwork for the background screening to start. Some organizations are already using different Applicant Tracking Systems. If your organization is among them, you can easily integrate your software with the background screening portal, which allows a one-stop shop for all your HR needs. The marketplace isn’t short of technologies that the HR department or recruiters may utilize to make background checks of job candidates simpler and faster.
A good example is background screening technology which automates the background screening process of an organization. This way, the hiring manager can exchange information with prospective employees from any location. You can achieve anything with this technology, from disclosure and document authorization to candidate demographic details.
- Ensure Compliance With Relevant Laws
When hiring remote workers and keen on performing background checks, the organization must pursue compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Irrespective of the new hire’s location, it is imperative for the organization to comply with the applicable laws that affect the hiring process.
- You May Utilize Paperless Drug Screening
A paperless drug screening supplies job candidates with instructions to choose and visit a testing lab within their area. The prospective employee selects a preapproved testing clinic, and the organization is notified when a candidate completes screening, and the results are available for review. This solution is designed for mobile use, making it easy for job candidates to finish their testing for the hiring process to progress and end within stipulated timelines. Rather than send paper forms or send instructions over an email, prospective or existing remote employees can perform their drug screen via this device.
- Use Multiple Techniques For Employee Verification
We’ve already ascertained the consequences of a bad remote hire in an organization. One of the most effective ways of preventing bad remote hires is utilizing multiple methods for verifying the information provided by a prospective employee. For instance, the telephone shouldn’t be seen as the only way to perform education and employment verifications. Since the job candidates and their former employers may be based anywhere in the world, it’s imperative to deploy a comprehensive verification process that incorporates many contact methods such as email, phone, fax, and third-party database integration. Deploying multiple verifications approaches provides more ways for responding to requests and boosts the chances of obtaining a reply while cutting back on inefficient phone tags. In turn, the company or hiring manager obtains thorough verification information for job candidates irrespective of location.
- You May Engage Outside Help
Sometimes, the HR department is overwhelmed and hardly has the time to perform background checks on its prospective employees. Instead of delaying the hiring process, which can, in turn, interfere with business continuity, a company may seek outside help. Before hiring a consultant to perform background checks of job candidates on your behalf, you should consider a few factors, which include:
- The cost – you need to understand that conducting a background check internally is more cost-friendly than hiring an outside firm.
- The speed of the process – if you dont have the time to conduct background checks on a candidate, outside help may come in handy, especially if you insist that the consultant prioritizes your background checks.
- The level of comfort of performing this task – some hiring managers are usually uncomfortable with this task. They dont like researching the past of someone. In such instances, an outside company is your surest bet.
Conclusion
If you think hiring an in-office person is difficult, try recruiting remote-based workers – it’s even harder. We are talking about a person you may never get to meet in person. We are talking about a person whom you hire completely online and then allow access to company and client information. In this regard, the hiring manager must take the utmost caution to ensure they get only the best, dependable, trustworthy individual. The last thing an organization wants to deal with is costly consequences that ruin its reputation and financial stability – and that’s where thorough background checks come in. An organization should conduct background checks on employment history, work history, driving history, drug testing, and numerous other forms of background checks. A credit check may also be important if the person is handling money. Screening their social media activities is equally important if it’s a position that requires dealing with clients. The hiring manager must know that they owe it to the company and other remote workers to find the best fit for any remote employee so that business operations will go on uninterrupted and, in some cases, get better.
References
- https://www.goodhire.com/background-checks/#:~:text=A%20background%20check%20is%20a,validity%20and%20make%20informed%20decisions.
- https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/types-criminal-background-checks
- https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/background-check-for-employment
- https://baradainc.com/background-checks-for-remote-employees/
- https://www.scoutlogicscreening.com/blog/background-checks-for-remote-workers
- https://www.chanesolutions.com/blog/2022/01/18/the-importance-of-background-checks-for-remote-employees#:~:text=Once%20you%20have%20obtained%20permission,%2C%20employment%2C%20or%20educational%20histories.
- https://blog.completepayroll.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-background-checks-for-remote-employees
- https://mybinc.com/blog/background-checks-for-remote-employees-things-to-consider/
- https://www.corporatescreening.com/blog/hiring-remote-employees-how-to-run-a-background-check-in-a-wfh-world
- https://impeccablebgs.com/background-checks-for-remote-workers/