What is candidate background screening and how does it work?

Background screening is one of the essential tools for personnel hiring. It consists of reviewing the candidates to make informed decisions when hiring.

What does a Background Screening cover?

Generally, a background screening takes into account the following aspects to ensure that the new employee will be a professional and trustworthy person:

• Criminal record validation
• Identity verification
• Verification of previous employment
• Education verification
• Address confirmation
• Personal and professional references
• Drug screening test
• Driving record
• Medical history
• Credit history

Reviewing and evaluating each of these items greatly facilitates decision-making in personnel selection processes, as companies ensure they hire the right people for each position.

Furthermore, conducting background screening translates into savings in time and resources in the future, as it is preferable to hire the right people from the beginning, rather than realizing later that a serious incident has occurred that can cost the company money and demand more HR time.

Background screening is important because it is much more difficult to terminate an employee’s relationship than to conclude the selection process with a candidate.

In fact, according to the presentation given by the Society of Human Resource Management, Recruitment and Selection, replacing a supervisor, technician, or any middle manager can cost from 50% to several times the annual salary of a person.

How does candidate background screening work?

As you can imagine, reviewing each and every one of the items that make up a background screening can take days or even weeks if done manually. Fortunately, today there are technology-driven tools that allow automating one or more of the elements involved in background screening.

We will address the specific case of Emptor, a tool that automates the validation of criminal records and identity verification of the candidate, allowing to obtain a detailed report in a matter of minutes, all from the same platform, and with just a few clicks.

How does it work?

Simple. The recruiter provides some form of candidate identification - such as the CURP in the case of Mexico. When this information is already in a recruiting system like Greenhouse, the information is obtained immediately, as Emptor has the ability to integrate with it.

Once Emptor receives this information, the system will begin to verify the candidate’s identity - essential to prevent internal theft and fraud; then, various databases will be checked to validate if there are any criminal records. If necessary, international sanctions are also validated.

After a few minutes, the recruiter can consult the final report with the details of the search.

Would you like to see it in action? Request a free demo.

As you can see, background screening does not have to be a manual and time-consuming process as it was before, thanks to the fact that there are now various options and tools that greatly automate the process and translate into substantial time and resource savings for the Human Resources area.