3 Ways to Craft Company Culture Through Screening

Your background screening program may be a peripheral yet necessary influence on your company culture. Let’s explore how your background check program can contribute to your culture in three ways.

1. Understanding candidate fit
2. Contributing to workplace safety
3. Uniformity in policies and procedures

Finding the right cultural fit

Culture is molded by those you hire, making the selection of job candidates crucial to maintaining a consistent cultural tone. Hiring someone who isn’t the right fit can hinder collaboration, decrease productivity, and may ultimately lead to more costly turnover. So, determining potential cultural fitness is beneficial to both you and the candidate. A candidate attracted to and well-aligned with your culture has the potential to become a successful addition to your organization for the long haul.

Beyond providing a potential criminal history, the screening process can offer valuable insights about the candidate, which may help you determine whether or not they might be a good fit. Employment verifications and professional reference checks may be the best way to tell if a candidate will interact well within your organization. These professional verifications could offer insights into skills and experience, how the candidate interacts with colleagues or clients, or even personality traits. Other types of background checks can also contribute by helping to identify which candidates share your company values.

Cultivate a safety-first workplace

It’s not that everyone must feel warm fuzzies every time they come to work, but exhibiting care for your employees might boost employee morale and motivation. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a well-known psychological theory that has the potential to be used by HR professionals to assess employee development needs, safety is at the base of the pyramid.  You can demonstrate how invested you are in providing a safe workplace with background checks. But more specifically, developing a robust screening program to avoid the potential of missed records could go the extra mile to decrease the possibility of employing someone that has exhibited risky or harmful behaviors in the past.

What steps can you take to avoid missing records? Consider these options for a screening program with a broader reach:

• A Social Security Trace could uncover potential names and addresses to search. Sometimes records exist under an old alias or in a random jurisdiction.
• A National Criminal Database Search can provide tips and leads for potential records by searching over 600 million records from various sources.
• Consider searching less common, but helpful sources for driving record infractions, federal criminal records, or sex offender information.

The wider your screening reach, the less likely a record might slip through unfound. Download our latest eBook to read about a 3-Step Plan to Stop Missing Records ››

How is this method of workplace safety visible to your teams? One potential way is recurring background checks on current employees. In addition to finding new records post-hire, rechecks could let everyone at the company know that their co-workers are still aligned with cultural standards, even if they have been there for years.

Doing what you can to avoid hiring risky candidates extends your efforts to provide a safer work environment for your employees and echoes a culture of care.

Set straightforward procedures

Creating a healthy employer culture is all about remaining consistent in your operations. Luckily, specific strategies in your screening program can help you keep hiring processes and standards cohesive across departments and hiring managers.

One option is to develop pre-determined screening packages.  This has the potential to streamline your screening process and leave little question about what background checks each candidate will have completed. You could create different packages depending on the job position, level, location, or other factors. By arranging your screening program in this way, you could keep how you screen consistent across all candidates and avoid having your hiring managers guessing or guiding the configuration of each new screen.

Another tactic for creating consistency in your program is using a report scoring or adjudication service. This type of service highlights specific criteria, that you determined in advance, in final reports, so anyone reviewing the reports can instantly compare the report to your internal policies and see what the next steps are in your hiring process. Much like packages leave little question about what background checks to order, report scoring can help your hiring team make decisions on what needs to happen next for each candidate. 

In the end, consistent background screening procedures may lead to logical, consistent hiring decisions. And consistency is one way to build the strength of your culture over time.

The benefits of an influential company culture go beyond employee interactions. It contributes to attracting engaged and talented candidates – which leads to increased productivity and profits. And in a way, everything you do in HR contributes to the building of that culture over time. By taking a strategic approach, your screening program can help build your cultural by helping you find the right candidate, delivering a safer workplace, and creating consistency in the way you hire.

Want your background screening program to contribute positively to your company’s culture? Contact Verified Credentials today to learn more about our comprehensive suite of background screening solutions.