Stay in control

Although it’s tempting to think of it as being solely linked to the recruitment process, the world of employee screening is far broader than you might realise. For sure, Pre-employment screening (everything from criminal record and employment reference checks through to litigation checks and media searches) is vital for any business wanting to prevent the ‘wrong sort’ of person from becoming an employee.

However, we’re now seeing a growing demand for Post-employment screening or vetting as well. This is something that has already taken hold in the US, expanding beyond the regulated sectors where you would expect it to feature (such as healthcare and banking) and into areas like retail and manufacturing.  

It’s an eminently sensible development, when you think about it. After all, if one of the functions of HR is to minimise the people-related risks within a business, why would you limit yourself to only the newly-hired employees? What about the existing workforce?

What about those employees who are about to move into a different role within your organisation?  

And what about those employees who, once hired, have a change of circumstances, meaning they would now fail to meet the pre-employment screening criteria you had in place?  

Examples here could include the driver whose privately-owned car is no longer suitably insured to carry out their work duties or the employee who works with children but no longer holds a valid
Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) certificate. Alternatively, there’s the employee who now has an anti-social behaviour order against their name or the person in charge of your valuable data assets who’s developed a gambling addiction and needs access to cash.

How would you know? Without having self-declaration processes in place and routine, regular checks for all existing employees, you won’t. 

This is not scaremongering. The amount of legislation and regulation affecting most businesses nowadays means that the potential cost (financial or reputational) of a single rogue employee is immense. Just ask the investment banking sector about rogue traders.

This is why we expect to see a continued move towards a screening policy which covers both pre- and post-employment. The services which the two different phases require are broadly the same. It’s merely the size of the audience that is (significantly) different.

Think about the factor by which current employees might dwarf the number of new recruits in any given year: x5, x10, x100? Now add in temporary workers and contractors; maybe even certain suppliers as well.  That’s a potentially substantial volume of people risks being left unmonitored within your existing workforce.