Employee remote background check: Why is it necessary?

One of the most neglected elements in the digital transformation of companies this decade is compliance. The possibility of migrating the operation of companies to the digital environment, including not only the home office or remote first with employees who already belong to the company, but also the hiring of remote candidates in a distributed manner around the world, have generated a profound change in work and work environments.

Companies enjoy increasing diversity in their collaborators, more retention, and a better work environment. However, remote work entails risks of professional fraud and cybersecurity that we could previously control better in the offices and that today require more effort to regulate.

In this article, we tell you some considerations regarding the risks we face when hiring remote employees, and explore solutions to mitigate them.

Cultural context to understand professional fraud

The global economic situation is strongly impacting the labor market in Latin America. While our region, like the rest of the planet, is experiencing the early stages of economic reactivation after the pandemic, there are more and more young people entering the labor market. Not only that, but they are also increasingly specialized thanks to the increase in access to higher education.

However, most companies still publish their vacancies with requirements that are difficult to meet (minimum years of prior experience, specializations, master’s degrees, etc.), and recent graduates are left in impossible positions to get their first decent job.

In other cases, we have experienced candidates who have been unemployed since the beginning of the pandemic, and when competing for a position, they are penalized in the selection process for their years of labor inactivity. Our Latin American culture also has aspects of distrust that influence the hiring of personnel. It is preferable to recommend and hire friends or family, as we often trust them more than strangers whose life story we do not know.

Considering this context, some candidates find themselves in the unfortunate situation of altering their CVs in order to get jobs. They omit information that could harm them in their professional or work profiles. Sometimes they even add previous experiences they never had. This Multilatin article exposes some of the most common lies or fraud in the selection processes in Latin America and the Caribbean.

On the other hand, given the high demand for specialized professionals, companies are forced to dramatically accelerate their recruitment processes, in order to hire candidates who are also interviewing with other employers. This means that we need to filter, evaluate, verify and select with increasing speed, and this is where we commonly start to sacrifice security and compliance with regulations.

Fortunately, when it comes to choosing background verification providers, the technology industry is advancing rapidly to provide us with good options. The important thing is to be able to choose a provider specialized in background checks that can quickly validate our candidates, and thus not lose them during the selection process.

What should you consider when reviewing the background of your remote candidates?

1. Local compliance

The first thing we must ensure as a company is that we are choosing a provider that complies with the regulations regarding background checks, particularly if they are criminal checks. It is important that when conducting a background check on a candidate, we do not violate their right to privacy of personal information (Habeas Data), nor use their personal data to perform searches in unofficial sources.

A clear example of this is when a candidate is in a selection process, and the company’s recruiter performs a search without the candidate’s consent on Facebook, Twitter or other social media (a practice known as “stalking”). Once this recruiter finds something in the candidate’s profile that they dislike, this candidate is eliminated from the selection process without even knowing why. This is a common practice, and since it is so normalized in hiring, many companies don’t even know it’s illegal (see this article).

2. Consent and information

The second thing we must take into account is that more and more laws are protecting workers and job applicants, and the risks of receiving a lawsuit for discrimination or improper hiring processes will only increase with the “remotization” of employees. In this sense, the best practice we can incorporate as recruiters is the complete transparency of the recruitment and selection process in our companies.

We must communicate to the candidate how the process works, how many phases it has, what documentation is required from them, how we are complying with the protection of their information, and, above all, ask for their legal authorization to conduct a verification of their identity and background.

Nowadays, there are many formats and templates that comply with the ethical and legal standards of each country to request these authorizations available on the internet. However, it is very important that each company verifies the local laws with its legal department, before conducting a background check on its candidates.

3. Relevance of the background

Finally, the perhaps least thought-out consideration is the relevance of the background check. Not all crimes are equally serious, nor are work records equally important, nor are educational records equally important for a position.

Companies have a duty to establish the standards under which we are willing to hire candidates, and this is especially critical in societies as unequal and violent as those in Latin America. One of the clearest examples of this scenario is the hiring of people who have been convicted and have been in prison paying their sentence.

This EuroSocial Program study in 2012 reviewed the post-sentence employment insertion figures for multiple populations in Latin America, and it is dramatic the low percentage of those ex-prisoners who managed to insert themselves into the labor market after serving their sentence. Companies must ethically decide whether we are willing to hire candidates who have served prison time for some crime, and are now seeking new opportunities to build a life from legality.

What did you think of these 3 considerations for hiring remote employees safely? If you liked this article, you may also be interested in this other one about the 10 essential hiring tools.