Screening Prospective Employees
by Barry Thompson, BOL Gurus BIO AND CONTACT INFO
QUESTION: I am the bank Security Officer and have been asked to help our H.R. Dept. come up with better hiring practices.
I am not sure how far we can go when investigating potential employees. Can we contact local police, or other agencies, for criminal background checks or can we get certain types of reports from the credit bureau?
ANSWER: Congratulations! You are working for a progressive institution or someone who understands the relationship between Security and Human Resources. There are many things you can do to investigate someone at any level of your institution before hiring them. The Notre Dame football program recently demonstrated the need to perform a proper review that would have avoided recent negative press coverage.
First, review the applicants resume thoroughly and call the references listed, asking them for three more people who know the applicant. The next layer of telephone calls will begin to give you an accurate view of the person.
Second, call previous employers listed and asked if they would rehire the person. We had an employee who was released for bad work review and several years later I was called as reference. I gave no concrete answers to any question except one> "Would you rehire this person?" My answer was a quick "no" which ended the call. While many Human Resource Departments will state only that someone worked for them, try to bypass HR and speak to the prospect's former supervisor. By calling all previous employers, you may find the person never worked for the organization or changed essential information like responsibilities, title and accomplishments. If these calls had been made early in the career of George O’Leary, he never would have been offered his head coach position.
Third, fingerprinting if approved by your management, is a very effective tool in stopping problems before they start. One good program is sponsored by the ABA, which reviews past criminal records and can be found at this link http://www.aba.com/Products/ps_finger_page1.htm. The information here will give more answers to the questions you have posed.
BankersOnline is a free service made possible by the generous support of our advertisers and sponsors. Advertisers and sponsors are not responsible for site content. Please help us keep BankersOnline FREE to all banking professionals. Support our advertisers and sponsors by clicking through to learn more about their products and services.
Print Friendly!
Email This Article!
Discuss NOW!
