As a small business owner, hiring the right employee can be a boon or bust for your company. A great person can be as efficient and effective as a well-oiled machine. A sub-par employee can throw a wrench into the gears and grind your team’s productivity to a halt. The risk of a bad hire can help be reduced by running a background check beforehand. To start, it’s important to understand the laws. For a more in-depth look at how to run a background check on someone, keep reading below.
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Small businesses are at their most vulnerable during the hiring process. Select the right applicant and you help the team flourish. But choose the wrong candidate and you may risk the eventual alienation of your best people.
Growing your business requires top-tier talent you can rely on. You need to feel truly confident when filling new roles and vacant positions. One of the best ways to help protect your business and grow your team is by running online background checks during the hiring process.
Understanding how to do a background check can help you mitigate risks.
Your top job candidate just completed the interview and you think that they are a perfect fit for the role. You can’t wait to offer them a job. How can you become more certain you’ve just met your next potential superstar? Go with what your gut tells you? Do another Google search to puzzle together some nuggets about a person’s background?
Instead, help protect your business, support your team and save your reputation by running an online background check.
Even if a candidate looks perfect on paper, it’s crucial that you take the time and consider doing a background check on someone to ensure that you’re hiring a good employee. There are many kinds of background checks. And the right one for your business depends on your industry and your organization’s needs.
In general, background checks can give you
- Information on any relevant criminal past
- Insight about credit history
- Ability to verify identity
- Rundown of past employment
- And more
Armed with this information, you can better understand if your applicant is the right fit for your company. If you want to learn more about how to run a background check on someone, what information you’ll find, and how much background checks cost, we’ve got you covered.
Read through for an in-depth look at how to run an online background check on someone, or use the links below to jump to the section:
What Is a Background Check?
A background check is commonly used by employers to make sure that a potential employee is suited for a position. These background checks provide critical information about a job applicant that should be evaluated in order to help employers determine if they are a good fit for their organization.
There are many aspects that can be part of a background check including:
- Identity verification
- Criminal history
- Credit checks
- Motor vehicle reports
- Professional licenses
- Education completed
- Previous employment
Most employers conduct pre-employment screening on new hires before they are scheduled to start. This is a standard business practice that can help you make a fully informed hiring decision, help reduce risk in the workplace, and verify candidate claims – all of which help to improve the quality of your hire. While it takes time, effort and money to conduct these checks, it is well worth it as onboarding a bad hire can to turn out to be costly mistake.
ShareAble® for Hires offers fast and convenient background checks, so you can get your employees vetted and hired as fast as possible.
How Do You Do a Background Check on Someone
The good news is, running a background check is simple. While there are different types, the process is relatively the same.
1. Understand the laws
Before you run a background check on your own, make sure you become familiar with laws that affect you. In addition to the federal government, each state has its own regulations on employee screening. Adhering to these rules is important for business owners.
Please consult your legal counsel to help ensure you review and are compliant with laws applicable to you and your business.
2. Gain consent
You should receive the candidate’s written consent before running a background check. Some companies do this by having job candidates sign an agreement that gives permission for background checks to be completed.
After gaining consent, many small businesses use ShareAble for Hires to empower applicants to:
- Provide ShareAble for Hire permission to run their background screening
- Control over completing the background screening
- Receive a copy of their reports
3. Collecting personal information
In addition, you might need to collect certain personal information such as first and last name, Social Security Number, physical address, or phone number.
With ShareAble, all you need is an email address. The applicant is contacted. They answer a few questions to verify their identity. They agree to sharing their information. And you receive reports—all in just minutes.
4. Run the background check
Some employers opt to take the DIY approach to employee background checks. Free online people search databases can retrieve information on applicants, but the data may not be reliable to help with hiring decisions.
It’s important to use a background check provider that provides reports on-demand. One of the quickest and easiest ways to run a reliable background check is to use TransUnion’s ShareAble for Hires. Get credit, criminal and Identity check reports within minutes so you can hire on the spot.
5. Review the results
Part of knowing how to do a background check means knowing what red flags to look for. For example, it’s important to understand how to spot potential resume fraud because a surprising number of applicants embellish their resumes to get hired. Take your time to thoroughly review the results of any background checks you run to make sure you’re not missing anything. After a while, you’ll develop a process that makes it easy to figure out if people are being honest on their resumes.
What Information Shows Up on a Background Check
1. Identity and Social Security Verification
Verifying the identity of job applicants is one of the most important parts of running a background check before you hire an employee. Generally when a background check is run, official databases are scanned to see if the number is valid, belongs to your applicant, or has been used in the past. Online identity checks offer valuable insight that can save you from hiring the wrong employee.
2. Credit Report
Credit reports can be particularly important if you’re hiring employees who are going to handle money, accessing sensitive financial data or developing budgets. An employment credit check gives you a look at things like number of tradelines, derogatory credit accounts, credit inquiries, and other information. The credit report is broken out into sections to help appraise overall financial health and evaluate factors such as: payment history, debt-level and monthly financial obligations.
Note: Pre-employment credit reports generally DO NOT include a credit score. For more information on why a credit score is not included in a credit report for employment screening, click here.
3. Criminal Records
Checking for any relevant criminal history is a crucial part of background checks. There could be types of offenses that indicate that a person is not a fit for the role or may be a safety risk. Criminal background checks for employment may show criminal offenses at the county, state, and federal level.
Shareable For Hires searches state and national criminal databases, most-wanted lists, National Sex Offender Public Registry and federal watch lists.
How Long Does a Background Check Take
Traditional background checks can take several days or even weeks to receive results. You might have to fill out an application to become a customer, or speak to a salesperson just to get started. The application alone can take hours or days to be approved. Worse yet, your application might be rejected, excluding you from getting access to screening tools at all. You could lose out on that star candidate due to process slowness or report delivery delays.
ShareAble For Hires is different. It puts your small businesses on the screening fast-track, and gives you:
- Rapid access to screening tools
- Designed for every SMB to use it, by providing some basic information about your business
- On-demand availability employment checks
- Reports for informed decision making
When you are ready to screen, ShareAble is ready to expedite the process by delivering nearly instant background information, credit history, and identification reports.
How Much Does a Background Check Cost
As a business owner, it’s important to understand how expenses like background checks affect your bottom line. ShareAble for Hires offers low-cost background checks, so your small business can hire with confidence without hurting your budget. It’s free to sign-up to establish your account. Pricing is straight forward—there are three convenient screening packages to choose from, and you only pay when you screen.
Run a Background Check on Someone With ShareAble for Hires
Hiring the right people is arguably the most important component of running a successful business. Employment background checks may help prevent risks such internal theft, property negligence and dangerous behaviors.
Run an online background check on employees and get reports in minutes.If you’re not taking advantage of fast, convenient background checks, give it a try.
