Abstract
In the wake of the corporate scandals linked to negligent hiring, many organisations worldwide have prioritised background investigations to avoid harm or legal liability and ensure safety of their assets, employees and clients. Negligent hiring takes place when an employer fails to verify that a prospective employee may pose a threat to their company. The article discusses the process of pre-employment screenings aimed at mitigating the risk of corporate fraud, unethical behaviour and organisational deviance. The goal of the article is to analyse a methodological basis for pre-employment background checks carried out by the in-house recruitment experts or third party employee screening companies. A large number of the existing studies have examined the theory and policies of pre-employment screenings, have scrutinised functionality and efficiency of background investigations and have addressed the methods used as part of this process. However, prior research has not identified a comprehensive and integrated technique of carrying out a pre-employment background check. To fill this gap, the paper suggests a vacancy-specific background screening of potential candidates according to the previously defined security criteria formulated in the article. The objective of the abovementioned approach is to generate an effective mechanism of identifying the so-called “risky hires” before the onboarding stage of recruitment. It is argued that both risk evaluation and pre-employment assessments of candidates should be viewed as a standard business practice integrated into a comprehensive hiring corporate policy.
Highlights
In the early 20th century, Henry Ford, an industrialist who revolutionized the assembly line production for the automobile industry and a pioneer of “welfare capitalism”, advocated for occupational staffing processes aimed at the principles of efficiency and support encouraging the “open hiring” model
Main terms and concepts The following terms are important to define while generating a technique of the preemployment screening: Personnel security as a term is used to define a number of activities: 1) as one of the indicators of the effectiveness of the organizational security linked to trustworthy and compliant staff; 2) as a “system of policies and procedures used to mitigate the risk of workers exploiting their legitimate access to an organization’s assets for unauthorized purpose” (Centre for Protection of National Infrastructure, 2000); 3) as a research area aimed at devising methods and techniques to prevent and detect occupational fraud
Screening candidates according to the criteria of the personnel security principles is a process that consists of: a) identifying certain personality traits that can be flagged as possible threats to the organizational behavior; b) taking managerial decisions about the outcomes of the recruitment process
Summary
In the early 20th century, Henry Ford, an industrialist who revolutionized the assembly line production for the automobile industry and a pioneer of “welfare capitalism”, advocated for occupational staffing processes aimed at the principles of efficiency and support encouraging the “open hiring” model. In the wake of the corporate scandals linked to fraud and unethical activity over the past few decades, the idea about hiring new staff members has been changing. Nowadays employers differ in the extent they rely on the cognitive and behavioral assessments but the vast majority of today's top executives and managers believes that a basic pre-employment background screening is a fundamental part of the hiring process. In keeping with the risk management approach, pre-employment screening is comprised of a range of mechanisms devised to identify a potential employee able to inflict a significant damage on the company’s reputation, circumvent the systems for their own benefit or engage in a data breach resulting in information disclosure or data leakage. It is estimated that companies lose an average of 5% of revenue annually to occupational fraud (Coenen, 2008), and severe employee misconduct can damage the brand. The need to reduce the costs of misconduct and unethical behavior has resulted in distinguishing the goals of personnel security from the general agenda of the human resource services
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