Making Informed Decisions - What’s Hot in Background Screening News
April 4, 2012
Welcome to our monthly edition of “What’s hot in employee background screening news”. If you want to become smarter about background screening, you’ve come to the right place. Here are some of the interesting items that caught our attention last month.
Match.com, eHarmony, Other Dating Sites To Screen For Sex Offenders
It’s been almost two years since women’s safety advocates began pushing online dating sites to begin screening their customers against available info for registered sex offenders. Yesterday, the operators of a handful of the most popular dating sites signed an agreement to do their best with the information they have access to.
Social Media Background Checks - Risky Business
Companies are using social media as part of their recruiting, candidate selection process, and everyday business operations. With more than 88 billion Google searches conducted monthly, chances are that your HR team, recruiters, or managers are searching the interwebs as part of the candidate sourcing and vetting process. You or members of your team search Twitter, build lists, make friends, and fill positions.
What Employers Are Thinking When They Look At Your Facebook Page
Like it or not, Facebook and other sites like it are becoming the digital proxies for our real world selves. Our profiles on Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, et. al. reflect our likes, dislikes, personalities, and best photo angles, and are likely more useful to employers in seeing what we might be like to work with than a short interview. If you don’t want employers (and love interests) to come snooping on your page to get a sense of who you are, set your privacy settings high; limit your content to “friends only.”
How to Build a Safer, More Dependable Workforce Using Background Checks [Infographic]
What Are Your Chances of Becoming a Crime Statistic?
Employee Theft: What Are People Stealing on the Job?
Workplace theft – from stealing merchandise to customer lists to money from the corporate safe – is serious business, exacting significant costs on companies, fellow employees and customers alike.
So what are employees stealing on the job?
When it Comes to Employment Screenings, Nobody Wants to Get it Wrong
Retailers have the legal requirement and moral responsibility to protect their consumers. End of story. But revised guidelines being contemplated by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could suggest that pre-employment background screenings be severely restricted or not even part of the application process.
What Employers Need to Know About Conducting Criminal Background Checks in Massachusetts
Effective May 4, 2012, the Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) Reform Act (the Act), which was enacted in August 2010 with the controversial “ban the box” legislation, will significantly change the way employers access, use, and maintain information obtained through the Commonwealth’s CORI system. The Act will allow all employers access to a new online records system, but also imposes obligations on employers that acquire criminal history information from private sources, such as consumer reporting agencies (background report vendors such as FYI Screening). Employers should review their hiring and background check policies now to determine whether any updates are necessary.
How To Detect a Lie [video]
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How A Woman Falsified Her Nursing Credentials For 18 Years
November 4, 2009
This is a fascinating and also sad story of how a woman stole, lied and cheated her way through life.
Source: TheTelegraph.com
For years, she kept ahead of her lies, moving from state to state with false credentials that showed her to be a nurse. This week, the law caught up with Catherine Marie Connor.
The Grafton woman was sentenced Wednesday to a year and a day in federal prison in a wire fraud case in which she followed a trail of deceit to secure a nursing license and nursing or related jobs in multiple states.
Connor, 55, was sentenced this week in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.
She pleaded guilty in July for a case that developed over a period of years, beginning in 1991 and ending in March 2009, court records state, during which time she made some $625,013.07.
A crucial element of the case was the woman’s background, dating to 1984 when, as Catherine Smith living in Virginia, she was sentenced to a two-year term on two felony counts of credit card theft and two felony counts of forgery, the indictment states.
Read more on How A Woman Falsified Her Nursing Credentials For 18 Years
Related Posts From FYI Screening:
- 3 Critical Reasons To Screen Health Care Employees
- 4 Ways That Employee Screening Boosts Employers’ ROI
- 4 Tips on How to Avoid Negligent Hiring Lawsuits
- More Background Checks
Photo credit: gbaku
Florida’s Flawed Background Screening System
September 28, 2009
Is your loved one in the care of a convicted felon? A six-month investigation by the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel into Florida’s background screening system found disturbing flaws that allow those with criminal records - offenses include child abuse, assault and murder - to work in day care centers, assisted living facilities and homes for the elderly and disabled. Employees are routinely hired before background checks are made. Even when criminal offenses are discovered, caregivers can still work with little more than a promise not to break the law again. Children and defenseless adults have been harmed and exploited while in the care of people with criminal pasts, their trust betrayed by a system that fails to protect them.
Source: South Florida Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel
Related Posts From FYI Screening:
Chris Miller is known for his expertise in employee screening and background investigations. His company, FYI Screening, Inc. helps employers improve the efficiency of their employee screening programs, minimize risk and hire smarter. He’s a licensed Private Investigator with over 30 years of experience in employment screening, retail loss prevention, corporate security and background investigations. For more information call 1-800-809-2419 or visit us online at fyiscreening.com.
The Secret of Successful Hiring
August 29, 2009
Two ways to hire (and a wrong way)
“The wrong way first: interview someone for an hour. If you like them, have them interview three or four other people in your organization for an hour each.
You’ve invested five hours of your team’s time, but really you only were looking for approval, because you’d already decided you liked the person enough to work with them for years.
All the evidence we’ve seen shows that this is a lousy predictor of future performance. And, let’s tell the truth… if the first three people love the guy, are you really going to let the fourth, junior person veto him? Or is it just an annoying courtesy?”
That is the wrong way to hire.
Read Seth’s advice on the right ways to hire here.
Top 10 Articles On Employee Screening
August 28, 2009
Since we’ve had an increase in readers to our employee screening blog, I thought it would be a good idea to make the new folks aware of our most viewed articles.
Here they are:
Want to learn more about employee background screening?
Employee Screening Articles For June & July 2009
August 3, 2009
In case you missed any of our employee screening articles for June and July, here’s a quick recap of our most popular:
- 6 Tips On I-9 Compliance In The Hospitality Industry
- 5 Legal Reasons Why Your Company Should Have a Social Networking Policy
- Are Colleges Spying On High School Students?
- Hiring Managers Are Checking You Out
- New Employee Screening Trend -Second Chance For Ex-Offenders
- E-Verify for Employers in South Carolina and Mississippi
- Small Business Guide To Pre-Employment Background Checks
- The Hottest, Newest HR Technology for Background Screening
- The Importance Of Post-Hire Background Checks
- 4 Tips On How To Use Social Networks For Employee Screening
Smart, Compliant Hiring Decisions Made Easy
FYI Screening, Inc. offers a complete portfolio of employee screening services that will help you work smarter while providing the industry’s fastest turnaround and the highest quality results. This will allow your company to focus on what really matters: hiring and retaining the best employees possible.
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Dangers Of Using Social Networks On The Job Hunt In Australia
July 22, 2009
NEWS.com.au (Australia) reports about the Dangers of using social networks on the job hunt.
Employers using social networks to gather information on job candidates could be breaking the law.
Social networks have become hot recruitment tools but Harmers Workplace Lawyers warn that using such sources to gather personal information to screen would-be employees carries a number of legal risks.
Harmers senior associate Bronwyn Maynard says many employers and recruiters are not aware of their obligations under the existing Privacy Act let alone the “General Protections” section of the Fair Work Act that came into force on July 1, 2009.
Under the Privacy Act employers and recruiters must:
- Inform a candidate that they have collected personal information about them.
- Explain the purpose of gathering the information.
- Tell the candidate who else will see the information.
Luckily for recruiters and hiring managers, most candidates don’t realise that under privacy legislation they are entitled to see notes made about them during the recruitment screening process.
“The Privacy Act also dictates that companies must only collect personal information that is necessary for their business,” explains Ms Maynard.
Candidates can apply directly to employers and recruitment consultants to see the notes made and information gathered about them during a recruitment campaign. A candidate can request that inaccurate information be corrected. If the candidate considers the information irrelevant he or she can then make a complaint to the Privacy Commissioner.
Ms Maynard said while there is no set timeframe, to expect a reply within 30 days would be a reasonable.
Read more about the Dangers of using social networks on the job hunt.
Related Posts From FYI Screening:
Photo Credit: Hexadecimal Time
Never, Never Lie On Your Resume
July 20, 2009
Secretsofthejobhunt.com has a good article titled ” Should I lie on my résumé?” by Ginger Korljan.
“Today I learned about a new website which for a fee, will fabricate job history, degrees, and references for a résumé. Their justification? “A résumé is not a legal document.” They even provide an answering service if a potential employer wants to follow up with a phone call. I was astonished that any company would be so brazen to attempt this outright illegal activity, and even more astonished that people are actually buying it!
Read the rest of the article here.
Related Posts From FYI Screening:
- 4 Common Lies Told By Job Candidates
- Can You Tell If Your Applicant Is Lying?
- Resume Fraud May Increase As The Economy Worsens
Want to learn more about employee background screening?
Photo credit: Loren Javier
The Pitfalls Of Using Social Networking To Screen Potential Employees
July 13, 2009
Here’s an excellent article on using social networks for employee screening.
Source: IT Business Edge
Lora Bentley spoke with Jacqueline Klosek, senior counsel and privacy law practitioner at Goodwin Procter, about the pitfalls employers want to avoid when using social networking and other Web sites to screen potential employees.
Bentley: I’ve read about the public outcry that resulted from the City of Bozeman, Montana’s decision to ask job applicants for their social networking site user names and passwords. Obviously, there are enough problems associated with that practice that the city discontinued it. Can you explain?
Klosek: It’s just, in my mind, fraught with legal dangers. For example, what you post on your own Web site, the writings and photos and such, you’re really using someone else’s service. And for the most part, if you provide your password to the sites in which you participate, you could be violating their terms of use, which could leave you as the user subject to potential claims, including termination of your account or worse.
Then, as an employer, say you ask someone for their user name and password and then give it to another employee to do the screening, you don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with that information. With the user name and password, they’re basically impersonating the person whose account it is. They can send e-mails that purport to be on that person’s behalf, they can review e-mails that were sent from other people… It could be mundane personal communications, but there could also be trade secrets being exchanged, or a host of other things behind these protected e-mails. It’s just a minefield of dangers, in my view.
Bentley: What if you are using the Internet to screen prospective employees without their user names and passwords? Aren’t there still risks in doing that?
Read the rest of the article here.
Related Posts From FYI Screening:
Photo Credit: AdamSelwood
Great, New HR Technology for Background Screening - Simplifies HR Management
June 26, 2009
Take Control With Convenient Account Management Options Built Into Your Screening Software
Go beyond ordering and reports - simplify HR management and tap into powerful tools.
Our client module gives you access to features that streamline the whole screening experience.
- Modify email and fax information, notification preferences and company information in real time
- Sign up for regular screening statistics emails, giving a comprehensive summary of screening information on a daily, weekly or monthly basis
- View past invoices online and download useful documents such as release forms from your own secure site
- Administrative users can add, remove and manage other users online
- Permissions management allows you to limit specific user access as needed
