Saturday, September 15, 2012

Why People Conduct Employment Background Checks

There are difficulties associated with getting a pay raise or fresh employement, especially now. Part of the difficulty arises from the high competitiveness of the market. Companies themselves add to the hurdles with some of the qualifications they set.

When seeking new personnel, employers do quite a bit of investigation. Their goal is to make certain that they are picking the best option possible. This is why they bother to check potential employees' backgrounds.

This is not at all an uncommon thing to do, and it is also considered a requirement in some places. There are certain posts that are extremely sensitive to the characters of those filling them, after all. Fields like medicine, law, and legal enforcement require a specific kind of personality and sensibility, making background checks important.

There are a number of explanations for background check practices. They are advantageous to nearly everyone in the equation. A good first explanation would be the avoidance of lawsuits from clients.

It cannot be denied that it is not as hard as it used to be for people to sue companies now. They can make claims and file legal actions against businesses whenever they feel slighted, mistreated, taken advantage of, or handled improperly. It is partly to prevent mistreatments like this that companies do an employee background check on their employees' characters.

Employers try to avoid negligent hiring lawsuits since they could be costly. Suits like these can definitely bring down sales too. Hiring the wrong person is always a liability.

Then there are cases where kids are involved. Kids are among the most delicate of creatures. Jobs that involve the care, welfare and protection of children are under the watchful eyes of the law, and these job positions include teachers, day care employees, the clergy, coaches, and scout troop leaders, to name a few.

And there are more people besides the children to think about, people like the weak and the aging. They cannot protect themselves as well as some of us can. State laws require professionals handling the elderly and disabled to undergo background checks.

And finally, the most common and obvious reason why corporations do background checks is that applicants tend to lie. It is common to receive false or inflated information on one’s resume in a desperate attempt to land a job. Naturally, you have to do a bit of digging to verify resumes.

It is not uncommon to get a dozen applications for each opening now. Fortunately for corporations, they have modern tools and devices to help them study the backgrounds of their many applicants. You should no longer be surprised if a company does an employee background check on you. In some companies, they require employee background checks on their employees characters. For more information, check my latest blog post.