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As the name indicates, pre-employment refers to “prior to employing” or “before hiring” someone for a job, or simply signing a contract for employment. Screening means “full” checking or viewing. So the term pre-employment screening means viewing or checking a person’s history before employing him/her for proposed jobs, or signing any employment contract. The method of such screening is different in different organizations or companies, depending on the status of job/work they are providing and the nature of business/company/organization. However, some of the tools used for screening are similar in most of the organizations e.g. credit check, reference check, history check, criminal check etc. Some of the tools are more important for certain organizations and less important for others, for example drugs check and health check etc.

Pre-employment screening helps an organization a lot in assessing the ability of a person and his/her strength for the growth of the organization. Sometimes an employee becomes quite an opportunity for that organization, helping it in achieving its goals and objectives in a more efficient and effective way.

Consider the case of a company that employs someone for a labor vacancy. The company will be screening his/her health, references, his/her previous work place record, and his/her organizational dealing with his/her clients and colleagues. On the other hand, if a company is hiring someone for a management vacancy, then it will be screening his/her previous employment record along with his credit history check, his criminal record, and his/her behavior with other members of the company (other workers and the owner or “boss” of the company) during the period of employment. The prospective employee’s organizational record will be checked as well to assess the level and quality of his/her skills and anticipate his/her usefulness to the organization in achieving its end tasks.

For any size of a business or organization, pre-employment screening is a necessary hiring tool in order to avoid law-suits and costly recruiting and hiring mistakes. In the past, pre-employment screening was used to be done by just screening new employees through reference check and making a few phone calls. Pre-employment screening has been gaining ground among security concerns, corporate scandals and work place violence.

An important tool of pre-employment screening is the background check, which can access a full range of data including:

• Credit Records

• Academic Records

• Social Security Number

• Personal References

• Driving Records

• Criminal Records

• Workers’ Compensation

Among other things, drug testing and psychometric testing are also used to determine the background and identity check of prospective employees. According to The Society for Human Resource Management, over 96 percent of HR employments involve background checks of new hires, up from 66 percent in 1996.

Nowadays, most of the organizations are using out-sourcing as a tool for the pre-employment screening before hiring new employees. This involves hiring external organizations or companies to do the pre-employment check of their new hiring. For example, many organizations now make contracts with agencies for hiring new staff, so the agencies perform all the assessments, reference checks, criminal record check, academic records check, and credit check etc. The candidates who pass these tests qualify for joining the organization.

Tags: background checks

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under Recruiting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.