Hiring for Your Business: Do You Need Background Checks?

When hiring for your business, you are trusting him or her with information, access and other items necessary to your business. As a result, its important to make sure that you are hiring someone you can trust. While nobody is perfect, there are some red flags that you do want to watch out for when you are hiring.

Below is an infographic from Business.com that shares information about the importance of performing background checks on potential employees:

Visit Business.com for background checks and other business resources.

Are Applicants Being Honest with You?

What I found interesting is that 53% of resumes contain untruths. These prevarications may be as small as trying to minimize a gap in employment or a little bit of importance inflation. However, some omissions and untruths might be more serious. Catching some of these more serious problems might lead to issues that could come back to haunt you.

Running a background check can help you catch red flags in an employee’s history. Some of these red flags can help you identify security risks, as well as those who might behave in a way that could result in a lawsuit against you, or some other problem.

Background checks can include criminal history as well as credit history (although employers aren’t supposed to check credit scores). However, you aren’t supposed to just run a background check. You need to inform your potential employees that you plan to run a background check, and let them know what that entails. You then arrange to receive permission to run the check. If the prospect won’t give you permission, then it’s up to you to decide if you want to take the risk and hire him or her.

Saving Money with a Background Check

Running a background check ahead of time can save you time and money later. According to the Business.com infographic, it can cost $7,000 to replace a salaried worker. However, as the worker being replaced does more advanced work, the more expensive to replace he or she becomes. It costs $10,000 to replace a mid-level employee and $40,000 to replace a senior level executive. It’s fairly clear that the more specialized someone’s job is, and the more decisions he or she makes, the more expensive he or she is to replace. That means it’s important to do as much as you can to hire the right person at first. And that means being careful about the potential hire’s past and running a background check.

Background checks can be costly; you don’t always have to check everyone who applies. Narrow down the applicant pool before you begin running background checks, and only run them on top candidates. Additionally, you can also choose to run them for the more sensitive positions if you aren’t worried about lower level employees having access to information and supplies that you are concerned about.

In the end, you have to do an analysis of the situation and decide what is most likely to work best for you. However, some level of background check is a good idea, especially if you are concerned that an untrustworthy employee could bring down your business in some way.