The Human Resources department is one of the busiest in any company. They don’t generate profit in a direct way – they’re not the one manufacturing or selling goods, they don’t interact with the clients, but their job is even more important than that.
They keep the whole place running and this is a high responsibility. Fortunately, HR managers in Australia can use digital technology to automate many of their routine jobs, so the personnel can focus on economic forecasts and streamlining the company’s activity.
Here are a few ideas to automate pre-employment checks in your company.
Use online background check agencies
Hiring an employee in a hurry, without performing a police check, is a risk you might not want to take. When you bring in a company a person with various criminal offences on their record you’re putting the risk both the company and your workforce, especially if you have no idea you’re dealing with a former convict.
An employee previously jailed for fraud or embezzlement might use his or her old schemes to steal company funds and it might be months or years before you realize what’s going on.
Someone with a violent character or with a history of sexual harassment can create troubles in the workplace, generating a climate of permanent tension which will impact productivity.
On the other hand, you don’t have time to send every potential employee to the police station and wait till they come back with their police clearance.
It’s a complete waste of time you can eliminate by using the services of an online character check agency like the following link to the ANCC site: australiannationalcharactercheck.com.au which is an online service for national criminal history checks in Australia.
When you have an account with such an agency you can quickly input all the information on the prospective employee and you’ll have their criminal record emailed to you in 2-3 business days. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
Don’t forget about identity checks
Identity fraud might not be such a big thing but there have been some high-profile cases in Australia of people obtaining employment in a managerial position under a false identity. To avoid such problems, you can use agencies specializing in identity checks and there’s literally no red-tape involved.
How to do and use social media checks
Over the past decade, many Australian businesses have started using social media checks. Social media tend to play an increasingly important place in our lives and a recruiting agent can learn a lot of things about a prospective employee’s characters, hobbies or world views.
These are all useful things to know if you want to make sure the new employee will fit in nicely in your team.
You can do a quick check on your own, and also google a candidate’s name for additional information, but you can also find agencies who are offering this kind of service.
You’ll need to be very careful how you use such information as there are no clear regulations on the legality of doing social media checks on a person.
There’s an ongoing debate on respecting a person’s privacy rights and the obvious fact that all the information you can obtain from Facebook, Twitter or Instagram are basically public and not private.
