contractor success Background Screening For Quality Hires Employers must make an informed decision to avoid hiring a ‘walking lawsuit.’ By: Alfred Firato A After just a glance at the Internet or a news-paper, it’s quite evident that we’re not living in our father’s world anymore. With the borderless market, a strained national economy and the maturing of the World Wide Web as a business tool, the 21 st century presents entirely new challenges for businesspeople, especially in hiring. The second decade of the new century has demonstrated that hiring should not only be intuitive but also be based upon the empirical and demonstrated past behavior of the applicant. Every day people with criminal records, falsified educational credentials and other serious liabilities are hired by companies who fail to thoroughly check their back-grounds. The result can be acts leading to theft, fraudulent actions and expensive negligent hiring lawsuits. An employer today must make an in-formed hiring decision to not hire a “walk-ing lawsuit.” The tool to accomplish that objective is pre-employment background screening. Employment Background Screening Regulations The background screening process is regu-lated by both federal and state laws to en-sure accuracy and fairness in protecting the rights of the applicant, while providing the needed information to the employer. The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) regulates the use of investigative consumer background reports as they per-tain to adverse decisions, notification to the applicant and the destruction and safe-keeping of records. The background screening process is regulated by both federal and state laws to ensure accuracy and fairness in protecting the rights of the applicant. 40 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • January 2014 Image courtesy of Joe Belanger/iStock/Thinkstock
CMM – Archives January 2014: 40
