Finding the best candidate for the job is always your goal when recruiting for any position, but lately, it seems like this has become much more difficult due to a highly prevalent lie that candidates tell about their employment history. Some of these inaccuracies include information such as past job titles, responsibilities and even reasons behind terminations/ dismissals. 

But recruitment can be a very expensive process with the cost of marketing job roles and the sheer man hours involved, but making the wrong hiring decision can be far more costly. Infact, according to statistics, bad hires can cost up to $240,000 (N93,000,000.00) in expenses, which is broken down to the cost of hiring,  pay, and retention – with 79% of companies that hired the wrong people admitting to losing $14,900 (N5,773,750.00) for each bad hire. This is no small change, and this is why background screening is so important

Even though combing through applications and carrying out interviews can help you get a solid first impression of whether or not a candidate might be a good fit, carrying out background screening helps to verify candidate claims, as well as provide crucial additional insights on which to base your decisions. To further highlight the importance of this, let’s look at some of the benefits of carrying out proper employment history checks.

How employment history checks benefits organizations

Performing proper employment history verifications presents many advantages for businesses and organizations. They include;

1. Risk management

Something as simple as checking a candidate’s previous job title, their duties and responsibilities and type of employment will verify the accuracy of an applicant’s claims on their CV and demonstrate integrity accordingly.  

In addition to verifying their previous employment position, employment history checks can be used to assess whether a former job has impacted their suitability for the role they’re currently applying for. This way, you can mitigate the risk of hiring an unsuitable employee. 

2. Reduced long-term costs

Pre-employment screening is not merely limited to ensuring that you’re hiring a candidate who hasn’t misrepresented information on their CV. Employment history checks have several potential long-term benefits as well, because the more you know about a potential candidate before hiring them, the more you’ll reduce the chance of making an uninformed or biased hiring decision.  

3. Better understanding of whether the candidate can meet job expectations

By deploying employment history checks, you are able to determine whether the candidate has lied about their ability to meet your job expectations or whether they can actually meet your expectations. Screening techniques such as reference checks or competency assessments are used to ascertain whether they previously worked in a position with similar expectations.  

Through this, you’ll be able to ascertain how the candidate performed in their previous positions and whether the expectations of those job positions are similar to your expectations for the current position.  

4. Identify any employment gaps

More often than not, a candidate may have gaps in their employment history on their CV, and this could be due to various reasons, including a dismissal. But by performing an employment history check, you find out if there are any gaps and then determine why the candidate did not account for that job.  

Additionally, how candidates respond to their employment gaps also gives you valuable insights. For example, are they able to give you an honest response and explain why they omitted certain employment history from their CV? Or do you sense that they are making up excuses or omitting information?  

Either way, an employment history check can help provide you with the confidence to make the appropriate decision. 

Conclusion

New hires can turn out to be the biggest asset in your organization, but make no mistake, they can also turn out to be the biggest loss. This is why you must commit to conducting employment history checks before employing candidates, and processes like this are best carried out by organizations like ours. 

At Reposebay, we offer top class HR consulting services as part of our dedication to helping businesses scale. We do this by providing invaluable expertise and guidance for Startups, SME’s and large corporations in order to assist in navigating complex human resources challenges.