DIY employment screening doesn’t save money

Times are tight for just about everyone, and that means smart businesses are finding large and small ways to cut corners. If you are an employer who has decided to conduct your own pre-employment screening rather than hire a professional employment screening service, have you considered all that the do-it-yourself process entails?

First, it’s important to realize how much work is involved with pre-employment screening. First there is the education verification, to ensure the applicant hasn’t padded his or her resume with a degree that wasn’t earned or a learning institution that is not accredited. Then there’s the tedious process of delving into public records to find out what you can about the applicant’s criminal background. The information kept in public records vary from state to state, so multiple searches must be conducted to get the most thorough results. Also the information in a public criminal record varies based on the offense and how many years have gone by since the arrest or conviction.

It’s easy enough to pull an applicant’s credit report, but wading through the pages of information to get a general sense of the person’s financial standing and fiscal responsibility can be difficult if you’re not trained to know what to look for and how to interpret credit score numbers and notes.

Finally, checking references, both professional and personal, can become a full-time job, leaving voicemails, setting up time to call, and keeping track of who you’ve talked to and what they said.

Conducting the entire process yourself might seem like it’s saving you money, but if you added up the hours you lost from your regular duties in order to gather and decipher information about a single candidate, you’d realize your time is much better spent hiring a professional employment screening service, and getting back to whatever it is you do best.

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Dickinson State University audit results show importance of education verification

Diploma mills and degree mills sound like fiction, but they are a very real threat to an employer’s workforce. A recently released audit of Dickinson State University in North Dakota underscores that fact. The audit examined foreign students who have taken part in a special program since 2003 allowing them to earn degrees both from DSU and a university in their home country.

Out of 410 degrees issued through the program in question, 400 of them failed to meet standards for required coursework or credits. DSU had 127 agreements with international schools to have their students study in North Dakota, but of those 127 agreements only four met the requirements to be valid as part of this program.

Such astounding lapses in the collegiate level of academics suggest it is imperative for employers to include education verification as part of the vetting process for all job applicants. The college should be able to produce full transcripts of the student’s time at the college, including all grades and degrees or certifications earned. No pre-employment screening is complete without this important step.

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