Here are 3 reasons you need to run background checks

Background checks are one of the things you will be constantly doing through out the life of your business. While you may feel that background checks are at face value a way to find the criminal history (or preferably lack there of) of a potential hire, background checks can serve as much more than just a check up on your candidates.

1. The Obvious: Hiring Criminals is Bad for Business

We probably ALL realize that you don’t want to hire someone with a theft on their record for obvious reasons, but hiring someone that has committed theft or some other offense that you could have checked, may invalidate your insurance claim IF something were to go missing or worse occurs.

2. You need to not only protect yourself and your customers, but also your employees

In our business, typically employees or contractors work in teams. If you hire one bad apple and something goes missing, you could potentially be out a whole team if you can’t prove who may have committed the infraction. Set your teams up for success by partnering them with individuals they can trust as well. Remember, infractions don’t have to just be theft. If you see drug or DUI related charges, you could be putting teams at risk when it comes to workplace safety.

3. Background Checks are a great marketing tool

Besides protecting yourself, your business and your customers, background checks are a great marketing tool. One of the benefits you have over a random cleaning lady that someone can hire on Craigslist is the ability to show that your employees are background-checked. You can set your company apart by showing that your standards (including background checks) are above your competitors.

So who do you use to do background checks?

Checkr 

Checkr is used by some of the biggest on-demand companies in the world (Uber, Thumbtack, Handy among others…) they claim to deliver responses faster and you can use their API to integrate with your current processes. One of the negatives about Checkr is that they aren’t transparent about pricing

Onfido

Onfido is another great choice. While they take a bit of time to accept you into their program, their pricing is affordable and their checks are thorough. They also have an easy to use, simple interface that makes running background checks clear.

Goodhire

Goodhire is a bit more expensive but has a reputation of solid background checks. They also have an API and if you don’t want to use the API, you can take advantage of their dedicated account manager to help you with any issues you may have when running checks.

Are you currently running checks? Tell us your favorite services or techniques for running background checks.