Trust is crucial in a workplace. Employees must trust the company to treat them fairly and provide job security, while the employer must trust employees to be honest about themselves and their work. Trust is earned, but trust can be established by running background checks on the employee when it comes to hiring.
Background verification is the process of vetting a candidate to confirm authenticity. Onboarding a wrong hire can be detrimental to a company’s reputation and working in general. The background verification process in MNCs is stringent to ensure a thorough evaluation of new hires.
How background verification is done in IT companies
Do tech companies do background checks when hiring? Yes. Background checks for IT companies are of utmost importance. IT companies deal with sensitive data, concepts, and projects.
A hiring mistake can result in data breaches, fraud, and loss of clients. There are other reasons why an IT company must perform background checks. Here are some of the most important ones:
Safeguard assets
An IT company works with assets like data that must be kept private. Unfortunately, there have been instances where dishonest employees have leaked crucial information or traded them to competitors for monetary benefits.
Such activities are highly damaging to the company. This requires IT companies to be extremely careful while verifying candidates.
Reduce liability
Fraud committed by employees can result in financial loss, tarnished reputation, and even a lawsuit. A company can avoid all this by carrying out thorough background checks and only hiring people who clear the screening process.
Ensure quality candidates
IT companies require people who are highly skilled and possess knowledge in a specialized field. For instance, a Java developer must know how to work with JavaServer pages, web frameworks, and markup languages. A pre-employment check will ensure that only a qualified individual gets selected for the job.
Create safe environment
An organization must be a safe and secure place to work. For clients and stakeholders to partner with the company, they should trust it. Honest employees build a trustworthy company and are indispensable assets of the company.
Employment checks prevent the company from hiring people who can threaten the safe environment in any way or form.
Protect reputation
Will an IT company be able to get new clients if they have incidents of data breaches? No. In the IT industry, as with any industry, a lot rides on the company’s reputation. A client will agree to work with an organization based on its capability and credibility. A single unwarranted episode can bring an IT company down to its knees.
An IT company cannot afford to hire people who either have committed fraud or present false information about themselves.
Process of background verification in IT companies
A background verification process in IT companies is essential to hire the ideal candidates. Background screenings for the technology industry ensure that firms hire the best talent.
Checking a candidate’s work history, criminal records, educational background, social media profile, and credit score is how background verification is done in IT companies.
Work history
Generally, companies call up the previous employer to determine a candidate’s work performance, conduct, roles and responsibilities, and other information. Most IT companies ask for reference contacts from the candidate.
These contacts usually are of direct managers of the candidate. Reference calls are made to cross-check if the information provided is authentic.
Educational background
Fake degrees, bogus certificates, and grades are the most common frauds. To weed out misleading candidates, a company reaches out to educational institutions to confirm the educational history.
Verifying educational background is critical for an IT company owing to the specific skill set required to perform the job.
Social media profile
Companies nowadays conduct an online search to find out if the candidate has strong views that might be unfavorable to the company’s image. Companies have policies against the misuse of social media platforms for posting inappropriate and harmful content.
Criminal record
Companies access public records from court and law enforcement agencies to find out about the candidate. Investigating even white-collar crimes is necessary before deciding on a candidate. However, the information collected through this check has limitations in terms of utilization.
Without the applicant’s approval, the company won’t be able to screen them. If the screening results cause the employer to reject some candidates, they must send them a copy of the report and explain the rejection.
Credit score
A credit score is a numerical value given to an individual based on credit files. Most banks use credit scores to evaluate the risk of lending to a person.
However, sometimes companies can check credit scores to find out incidents of fraud. As a result, low creditworthiness can sometimes be due to dishonest practices.
Background verifications are a necessary process to follow before hiring an employee. Some companies outsource the process to third-party agencies, while others use background check software.
Deploying agencies and automated tools are effective ways of gathering information about a candidate. Once the company collects information about the candidate, it is up to them to decide if they want to proceed with the hiring.
