Background Screening: The Value of Background Checks

Who do you trust?

One of the greatest resources to help us live our daily lives and realize our dreams is having people around us who we can trust: friends, families, neighbors.

We grow to trust people by getting to know about them. When we first meet someone, the conversation takes a familiar path: what’s your name? What do you do? Where do you live? What do you like? Slowly, we make a judgment about whether or not this is someone we want to be around, to count as a friend.

Why does it matter?

For a company, the question of who do you trust is just as important, yet it often has to be made far more quickly. Trusting an employee means giving them access to the lifeblood of a business:

• The goods it sells
• The equipment it uses to produce
• The cash that flows through it
• The proprietary ideas and resources that make it unique and valuable
• The reputation on which it rises or falls

A good employee contributes to productivity, safety in the workplace, positive attitude among the workforce, solid relations with customers and partners, and security of intellectual property, inventory, and cash.

What is the danger?

A bad employee can undermine every single one of those. A bad employee can even topple a company over the brink of disaster. The US Chamber of Commerce and the American Management Association have provided us with a startling statistic:

Every day, headlines alert us to another danger: violence in the workplace. In a single month, the Workplace Violence Research Institute reported, an estimated 16,400 threats were made, 723 workers were attacked and 43,800 were harassed every work day. The average award in a workplace violence lawsuit is over $1 million, costing employers $36 billion each year.

Even if you weed out a bad employee before they do irreparable damage, they have cost you: Recruiting Times estimates that the cost to replace employees is:

• $7,000 to replace a salaried employee
• $10,000 to replace a mid-level employee
• $40,000 to replace a senior executive

What can you do?

The answer is to take every precaution to ensure that all new hires are exactly who they represent themselves as. And your first line of defense is a comprehensive, professionally designed background check.