Squinting in the morning sun, I woke up and waddled my way to the kitchen. I poured myself some coffee and headed to the table when I saw him. Sprawled on the couch, he was scrolling through his phone – completely oblivious to my presence. I got closer and was lucky to get a cursory nod for a greeting.
“Who are you?” I heard myself asking.
“Oh, I’m your new flatmate. Didn’t the landlord inform you?”
“Clearly not…” I mumbled as I tapped furiously through my phone looking for my landlord’s number. A short call later, the landlord confirmed that he had indeed given the new guy a set of keys and that he had moved in the previous evening. I must have missed the call during my Saturday revelry.
“Now that you are here, we might as well get to know each other”, I offered. After we got through pleasantries, I couldn’t resist, “When did you sign the apartment lease?”
“I haven’t signed it yet.” His response sent a chill down my spine, “The landlord is waiting for the result of my background checks before I sign the lease agreement.”
Here’s this guy, I have no clue who he is. And I’m supposed to share my living space, the kitchen, and even the Wi-Fi with him. Especially the Wi-Fi!
Does this sound like fiction?
Unfortunately, it’s not. It happens every time a new employee joins your organization.
Who’s the new guy (joinee)?
Traditional background verification (BGV) processes have a turnaround time of at least 14 days. In complex cases, it can go up to two months. During this period, an unverified employee has free access to corporate emails, intellectual property, and security details; the list goes on to cover pretty much every asset of their employer.
If this unverified hire has bad intentions, they could wreak havoc. From posting publicly using your company’s digital accounts to pilfering intellectual property for a competitor – possibilities are endless, and honestly quite scary.
Is this a risk that you, as HR, are willing to take?
What solution do you have? Are there alternatives to traditional BGV that can help you minimize your exposure to these risks?
TA Manager, the new Risk Manager
Before we go further, I would like you to put on a new hat – that of a risk manager. It would help to think of BGV as a series of small checks instead of one large, binary box that needs to be checked. With every step, your risk exposure of a wrong hire reduces through low-touch, instantaneous checks.
For starters, you can now carry out pre-onboarding digital address verification or an e-FIR check and get a preliminary assessment of the candidate. This ensures that you have covered some obvious bases even before the candidate joins.
Then there are cases that never close – those 1-2% of amber cases, where you may never know if the employee is green, or red. Sometimes, employers just do not respond to verification requests. Universities always close for the summer.
In such cases, there are backup BGV checks. You could carry out employment verification through an EPFO check. If discrepancies make you uncomfortable, you can always ask for an explanation from the candidate, but you now have data to form a probabilistic truth model of the candidate.
Let’s go further. What happens if an employee who was green at the time of onboarding, unfortunately, has a criminal complaint lodged against them after they have been working with you for a while? How do you continually monitor such cases?
For those cases, there is IDfy’s “Infinity Checks” that continually monitor criminal and legal databases to flag such occurrences and alert you if an employee has gone rogue so that you can take corrective actions before things go seriously downhill.
We can safely say that BGV is changing as we speak. Companies are coming up with creative ways for making hiring safer and safer at every step. It’s no longer about just the three traditional checks, it’s so much more. IDfy has been a pioneer of such an approach and helped several companies across industries mitigate BGV risks.
What are your thoughts? You can write back to me at vishvesh.nerurkar@idfy.net
A credit check keeps bad apples out of a company’s system. However, can all employers do so?When it comes to jobs that require handling company or client funds, the candidate’s financial condition comes into play. In such cases, a credit report is regarded as necessary. In this article, SHRM President & CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. provides detailed answers to critical HR topics.
Hiccups due to a challenging labor market
How many must suffer due to the fault of one?
A poor performer in the team is often not held accountable if you’re understaffed. But turning a blind eye to their poor performance is an even bigger red flag. It hurts the employee (because they’re doing things wrong), the manager (who’s losing credibility), and the company (whose performance is suffering which indirectly hurts customers and the bottom line).
This article highlights a few things to consider in case something like this might be happening in your organization too.
Can the ‘Director’ really direct?
To lure talent that might otherwise be hesitant to make a move, companies are giving rise to ‘title inflation’. Title inflation is when a person’s title makes it seem like they have more responsibilities than they actually do. Read this article to learn about the short and long-term effects of inflating titles on people and companies alike.
On a lighter note
