The Importance of Background Checks For Business Owners

If you are recruiting new staff then it is absolutely vital that before they are accepted for the job, that you have performed a full background check on them. When you check people like this you can find out a huge amount of information about them, information which could very well prove important to the business and its reputation. The process of doing a background check is not too quick so many business owners simply don’t have the patience and get people through the door as quickly as they possibly can. The dangers of this can be very severe indeed and if you aren’t aware of the damage that can be done simply because of missing a background check, here are just some of the situations which could arise.

Convicted Felon

It is fair to say that most convicted felons should be given a second chance, especially if they are open and honest with you about what they have done and what situation may have occurred. There are however some crimes with simply cannot be overlooked and that is why people who have committed the most heinous crimes, will of course not add it into their application form. If you do a background check you can see very quickly what these people may have done, but if you don’t and you hire them, you could be running into a lot of trouble. Just think what it would do to your company and its reputation if it was found to have someone working there who had committed an awful crime, your business may never recover.

Theft

The majority of theft in stores and businesses comes from inside and in many cases the people who commit the crime have a history of these things. In fact a recent case involving a huge high street brand in the US whereby members of staff were performing a refund scam that cost the company over $60,000 could have been easily avoided with a background check. Each of the individuals guilty of this scam had done the exact same thing in their previous jobs. All of this hassle and cost could have been avoided if the company had carried out a background check on these individuals.

Competition

Some competitors like to cause damage to other businesses by leaving a negative review on Google or something low level such as this, others however may take it a step further. We have seen several examples in recent years of corporate espionage, where an ex-employee goes to work for the competition solely for nefarious reasons. If not spotted before they start, these people can easily share sensitive information or even do damage to their new employer, in order to help the competition gain market share. This is not always easy to spot of course but when you run a background check you will at least have an idea of what their intentions could be.

The BBB or Better Business Bureau highly recommend background checks so don’t run risks, check your people and protect the business.