Which One to Choose – Pre- Or Post-Employment Background Verification?

Occasionally, we receive this query from the companies which are either just about to start employee background verifications for the first time or those which are keen to get an unbiased external opinion. Like with most of the issues with background checks, the answer is driven by the unique requirements of the company, the role / functional area, the seniority, the labour pool and the industry. Here’s how some of these may be kept in consideration.

The unique requirements of the company and the experiences which they have had till now with their recruitments have a significant impact on this decision. If a company has seen too many fraudulent candidates and a fair bit of discrepancies, it will definitely be inclined to go for pre-employment background verification. This decision is perfectly all right.

If the role is a highly significant or critical one or involves a high level of seniority, then it makes sense to go in for pre-employment checks so that the possibilities of discrepancy can be done away with and the company can move forward with employment of the candidate. For certain functional areas like finance, purchase/procurement, systems security, pre-employment verification may be the way to go.

If the labour pool available in the market is known for opportunistic behaviour or for highly discrepant resumes, it may again make sense to go for in for pre-employment screening. To a certain extent, this is linked to the industry too. For example, in the real-estate, construction and infrastructure industry, pre-employment screening is pretty much the norm. Generally a higher trust industry will tend to go for post-employment background verifications.

Whichever model you choose to go ahead with, we recommend that you always take candidate authorization for the background verifications. This may require you to issue the offer letter too in most of the cases. Also, in pre-employment verification, safe-guarding the current employment of the candidate should be kept in top most consideration. That is, the process of verification should not have an adverse impact on current employment of candidate.

Please feel free to share your thoughts via the comments.