Nowadays, pre employment screening is considered (in most progressive organizations at least) to be an integral part of the hiring process. It is something which has to be done to all potential employees, before they are actually given appointment letters. It has, as such, evolved into one of the hiring 'formalities.' And that turns out to be both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. It is a good thing in the sense that once employee screening is viewed as an essential formality, it gets done more frequently (and any hiring decisions which are not preceded by the screening exercise are considered 'irregular'). But the view of employee screening as a 'formality' is bad in the sense that, like all other hiring 'formalities,' people soon forget why it is done in the first place. They start doing it just for the sake of fulfilling the requirement. It ends up being done less thoroughly.
Of course, we all know the dangers of employee screening which is not done thoroughly. Among other things, such less-than-thorough employee screening opens loopholes through which the wrong people can gain entry into the organization as employees. Should such entry of undesirable people happen, the screening exercise would actually be serving no real purpose (seeing that the main objective in screening employees is to avoid admitting the wrong types of people into the organization).
A question then comes up, as to how an organization can get pre employment screening done the right way (so that it is not just another 'hiring formality' which serves no real purpose). At least three steps can be taken in that regard:
1. Getting the right team to do the screening. We come to realize that in many organizations where employee screening is done in-house, it tends to be viewed as a human resource department issue, and left to that department. That is dangerous, because more often than not, the human resource people lack the capacity to deal with some of the important aspects of employee screening. Whereas the human resource people can competently verify academic credentials and past work history, they tend to show great weaknesses when they have to do things like criminal background checks: which usually involve more 'digging.' Ideally then, if pre employment screening has to be done in-house, it should be done by an inter-departmental committee. Folks from the security department can do criminal record checks, whilst human resource folks do credential and work history verification, even as people seconded from the finance department do things like credit score checks and so on.
2. Designing (and conducting) the exercise in the right way. Ideally, the employee screening process should be comprehensive. A commonly made mistake here is where organizations focus on one aspect (say, the criminal record aspect), whilst ignoring other aspects. Yet through things like educational and work history checks, you can easily uncover - among other things -- criminal tendencies which have never come to the attention of the national security agencies.
3. Outsourcing the exercise. Organizations which honestly realize that they don't have the internal competencies to carry out pre employment screening in-house (and get it done the right way) should simply consider outsourcing it. This would be about retaining one of the firms which specialize in pre employment screening, to do it professionally, on behalf of the firm considering hiring the new people. This is a time saving and often more cost-effective approach to employee screening.
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