Pre-Employment Screening – What It Is And How It Works?

Pre-employment screening is the process for employment that employers conduct to ensure they are acquiring the right talent for their organization. Pre-employment screening is a process where employers test their potential employees for drugs and assess their behavior. Employers take necessary information like education credentials, address, etc to verify the information. This process is conducted alongside the application process to the final interview.

The pre-employment screening process is conducted to check candidates for:

• Personality traits
• Relevant skills
• Professional and education experience
• Criminal history
• Drug abuse history
• Culturally fit for organization or not.

Why is the pre-employment screening process crucial for organizations?

There are a few key reasons for organizations to conduct pre-employment screening:

To protect the organization: An employee with a criminal record will have a high chance of making mistakes again if he has not realized or been punished for the same. Moreover, what if your rival company sends an employee to work in your organization? So, a criminal check is crucial in pre-employment screening to protect your organization.

Avoid wasting resources: A Lot of resources and training go through the process of hiring. From processing applications to hiring and training an employee, requires resources. If you hire the wrong employee who does not understand your methods or is not willing to work long hours, it will waste your time and resources. So acquiring the wrong candidate will waste your sources.

Validating experience and education: Many people fake education credentials to get employment. People use educational documents by one person and take up the job. There are many such cases where people are working in an organization with someone else’s name. So, it’s important to validate their education as well as experience.

These are some of the crucial reasons that make pre-employment screening important.

Screening test and methods

There are different types of pre-screening tests and methods that organizations can try:

Pre-interview screening: This generally involves application and resume screening, phone or video interviews, aptitude tests, and personality tests.

Interview screening: It includes phone or video interviews, and office interviews to verify skills, knowledge, and education.

Third-party: You can hire professionals for employee verification. Sometimes having an in-house team to verify or use resources can be difficult and it’s time-consuming. Hiring outside firms for verification can be useful and make the process fast. Such as Zella helps organizations with verification.

What is covered in the pre-employment screening process?

Pre-employment screening tests everything about employees to ensure they are the right candidates for the organization. During the pre-employment screening, organizations include the following areas:

• Identity verification
• Criminal history
• Employment history
• Educational background
• Credit check
• Motor vehicle records(optional)
• Government licenses(optional)

Depending on the industry, this list can reduce as well as expand in the pre-employment screening test.

Conclusion

Pre-employment screening is an important part of the hiring process to ensure organizations are hiring talented as well as the right candidates. However, employees do not need to get scared or make a hoax of a screening test. If you are being honest about education, and knowledge, and provide all the right information, you will not have any issues.