Pre Employment Screening |
Jessica Veal |
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Businesses want to know more about their employees since Covid than standard background checks allow.
William Craig, Senior Screening Consultant, Vero.
Businesses are working harder than ever to drill down beyond a candidate’s standard working credentials as part of the recruitment process in the post-pandemic world.
There’s been a significant shift in the employment screening market over the last 18-24 months towards media and adverse media background searches for existing and prospective employees, for example.
Industry bodies have also been calling for enhanced regulatory processes and to bring further businesses into scope too. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has widened its own to cover the funeral care sector and other businesses offering lines of credit, like dentists, for example. There has also been a directive for schools to undertake social media checks recently too.
More international hires means more attention to detail.
At Vero, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of background checks being made internationally, with businesses wanting to know a lot more detail about a prospective candidate’s reason for coming to the UK and what they are required to disclose before they do.
The number of checks we have made this year, in comparison to the last, on behalf of UK-based clients have risen most significantly in the US (by 24%), India (by 32%) and in Poland (by 51%).
Different sectors have different requirements post-Covid.
Our service provision has also been stretched to include new areas of business for Vero too, including clients in the gas and oil field.
Sectors experiencing the greatest uptake in Vero’s screening services overall include the Fin Tech and Legal industries, with Fin Tech businesses in particular increasingly being asked to prove their own compliance by the clients they work for, and expected to screen their staff to the same level those clients would screen their own employees internally.
Successful hybrid working scenarios start with effective screening practices.
Now that so many businesses have largely moved to a hybrid or remote working scenario, businesses worldwide are more reliant on the background checking process than they ever have been.
This post-pandemic style of doing business means companies are needing to recruit quicker, and those of us operating within the screening industry have needed to be able to demonstrate our agility and flexibility in response.
Ultimately, how the individual chooses to present themselves in the wider world, online or in person, has the potential to negatively impact on any employer. So, businesses today need to ensure the candidates they are hiring are the right fit for them culturally, as it’s unlikely anyone internally will be spending as much one on one time with them as the working world allowed for previously.
If you’d like to discuss your employment screening needs, we’d love to hear from you. Click here to get in touch.