Why You Should Always Screen Potential Employees

Why You Should Always Screen Potential Employees

One of the largest expenses for any company is hiring a new employee. However, hiring someone is a huge decision, so how can you be sure that you’re hiring the right person?

Offering someone a permanent job based just on their resume and a few short interviews isn’t the smartest idea. Instead, you should also screen potential employees to learn more about their background, history, and experience.

You’ll always want to follow up on references as well, as they can provide valuable insight into someone’s personality and skills.

Why is screening important? Keep reading to find out why every company, large or small, should always screen potential hires before offering them a job.

Keep Your Workplace Safe

One of the main reasons for employee screening is to keep your workplace safe. As a manager, you have a responsibility to look after both the wellbeing of your staff and the assets and intellectual property of your company.

If you accidentally hire the wrong person, you’re putting your company at risk. Sadly, employee theft does happen, so screening is a great way to look into someone’s background.

Your new employee will likely be trusted with office keys, computers, and inside information. Therefore, you need to make sure you’re hiring someone trustworthy.

Saves Money

Can screening job candidates save you money? Yes, completely!

When you hire a new staff member, you’ve invested in them, covering recruitment costs, training, onboarding, and their wages. For this reason, you want anyone you hire to stay with your company as long as possible.

However, if you hire the wrong person, they’re likely to jump around from job to job, leaving your business shortly after starting. Make sure your company spends its money wisely by only hiring people who are committed to working for you.

If someone’s background check shows that they’ve had multiple jobs in the last year or two, they might not be very reliable.

Inspect an Applicant’s Social Media Activities

Many companies are now social media screening before hiring. While companies can’t discriminate based on religious or political beliefs, you can still gain valuable insight about someone by inspecting their social media—read more here.

This can help assess whether or not someone is a good fit for your company. If someone frequently posts photos that are provocative or adult in nature, makes bullying comments, or bad-mouths a previous job, these should be instant red flags for anyone hiring.

If someone is behaving badly online, they’re likely immature. They’re not going to provide the professional standard of service you’re looking for from an employee.

Hire the Right Person

Simply, screening is important since it helps you find the right person for the role. This is especially true if you have strict standards and need someone who has FBI or background clearances.

These can take months to obtain, so finding someone who already has them makes it easier to find the right staff member for the team.

Saves Time

For each job posting, you’re likely to get dozens, if not hundreds, of applications. Amazingly, each corporate job advertisement, on average, attracts 250 resumes.

How can you make sense of them all?

For large companies who are frequently hiring, you might be worried that your HR department is going to be drowning in incoming resumes. One way to save time and speed up the process is with screening.

Companies often like to automatically screen all resumes, using AI. This helps look for particular keywords that your business wants to target when hiring, helping you quickly narrow down the pool of applicants.

This lets you quickly weed out applicants who aren’t qualified, are living in the wrong areas, or are otherwise not suited for the role.

You’ll also help your management team save time, since they’re going to be the ones doing the interviews. The more information you can give them, the easier it will be for them to prepare for each interview.

From there, you can use more detailed background checks to narrow the pool down even further.

Peace of Mind

Background checks and screening are useful because they provide peace of mind to management. When you hire a new person, you don’t really know anything about them, other than what you learned from their resume and in the interview.

For a more comprehensive picture, screening lets you learn more about their history and background. This can give you more certainty that you’ve hired the right person.

Make Your Interviews More Focused

Once you’ve shortlisted just a few candidates, you’re likely ready to bring each person in for an interview.

One advantage of pre-screening means that you know more about each candidate and their background. This gives you more direction and focus for the interview.

You can ask targeted questions based on their previous roles, education. Or, spend time learning more about something in particular from the screening that you found interesting.

This helps you make the most of your limited interview time and should help you make the right decision when it’s time to offer someone the role.

Screen Potential Employees Before You Hire

Hiring new staff is one of the biggest decisions a company can make, so give yourself every possible advantage by screening potential employees before hiring.

It’s a small investment that will give your company more stability and increased safety. It will increase the caliber of staff you hire, so it’s sure to improve your company.

Get started today and start enjoying the benefits that background checks and screening can bring.

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