If you’re responsible for hiring employees for your company, you may want to implement policies to verify that they’re telling the truth about everything on their resumés. But how can you safeguard your company without snooping too heavily into people’s personal affairs, and potentially violating laws?
Here are a few tips on how to handle a background check:
- Don’t run a background check until you’ve made a conditional job offer. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and intrusive to run a background check on an applicant who may not even accept the job. Wait until the applicant has accepted your job offer, but make it conditional on positive results of a background check.
- Make sure to comply with all state and federal regulations. There are several regulations in place to protect individuals from privacy violations in background checks. Brush up on the rules before you begin the process – see the guidelines here (your state may have additional laws – consult with a lawyer for specific details).
- Don’t discriminate. Your department can make a policy of subjecting candidates for a specific position to a background check, but it’s not legally acceptable to single out a specific candidate. Create a policy that makes it clear when applicants will be subject to further investigation, so all candidates will understand the selection criteria.