Pre-employment screenings – What should I do?

Are pre-employment screenings really worth it? In short, yes! Hiring the right people is crucial to your company’s growth and success. By conducting quality pre-employment screenings, you will have to hire people less often, giving you time to focus on what you really need to be doing. Here’s a guide to making the most out of these necessary screenings.

First, let’s talk about why it is important to consider pre-employment screenings. What benefits do they bring to your business?

1. Pre-employment screenings help protect your brand. Your reputation is built around the people that work for you. Taking the time to check the background of those you hire will help you eliminate a lot of missteps before you take them.
2. Despite the upfront costs, pre-employment screenings save time and money in the long run. Let’s face it, hiring someone takes a long time, and it costs a lot in time and resources. Plus, if you have to end up firing them and starting all over, you’re burning more valuable time and resources. Adding a few easy steps before you hire to give yourself concrete, outside opinions about your new hire will help ensure you’re not placing another Help Wanted ad too soon.
3. Confirmation will help you sleep at night. Sure, that candidate shines on paper. And he might have sailed through the in-person interviews. But, if you take the time to confirm all that goodness he was spreading – like is he really drug-free? Or did he really graduate cum laude? You’ll have all the evidence you need to confidently go forward in your hire.

Now, let’s discuss what kind of pre-employment screenings you should include in your pre-employment screening package. Each business is different, and the screening needs are different, but here are some options to consider when evaluating what your hiring team should utilize.

• Background screening
• Drug and alcohol testing
• Pre-employment physicals
• Emerge Diagnostics baseline
• Functional capacity testing
• Baselines: surveillance, audiometric, respiratory, etc.
• Vision
• This list can be extensive and will be driven by the best services needed to reduce risk

Your pre-employment services should not be a check box.  Ultimately the services you need should drive a positive result, which will help reduce turnover, decrease losses and improve productivity.  They should also be performed in a cascading method, so you are doing the least expensive tests first that provide quick accurate information.  This allows you to make sound hiring decisions with the best information.

This may be entirely too much information for some (For example, do you need to know your candidates’ driving record? It’s a must for some; others can pass.), and this might be the list needed in totality for others. As always, you, the business owner, will know your company’s needs.

If you would like to talk through how to implement a pre-employment screening program at your company, please email or call Jeremy Green, Work Health Solutions Owner and Director of Marketing, at 918.402.1179.