Background checks can help prevent fraud in your small business
Recently SMB Finance magazine published a couple of articles about fraud and small businesses. SMB Finance is a bi-monthly magazine that provides news and resources specifically for financial executives in small and midsized businesses. The magazine is not available online. One article pointed out that small businesses lose five percent of their annual revenue to fraud. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it could be the difference between thriving and going under for many small businesses. Think about it. How much do you have left over after you've paid all the expenses? If your business took a hit for [...]
First time landlords beware
So, you can't sell your house and you think renting it out would be a good way to cover the mortgage payment while you wait for the market to come back from the dead. Maybe you're right. Just make sure you know what you're getting into. The Whidbey News-Times just ran an article on the perils that may await you. They titled it "Rental Nightmares". Here's an excerpt. Renting out one’s property can be a positive experience, ultimately building equity for the owner and providing cash flow. It can also be a doomed game of craps. Before you take the [...]
Background checks help prevent workplace violence
Workplace violence statistics are hard to come by because they're scattered all over. But we know it's serious and we know that you need to act to help keep your employees safe and keep yourself out of court. Here are some statistics from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the U.S. Department of Justice for the United States. There were 1.7 million violent workplace victimizations every year between 1993 and 1999. That's the last year, sadly, that we seem to have comprehensive statistics. Workplace violence accounted for almost a fifth of all crime in the same [...]
Use background checks, but follow the rules
There's an excellent article at In-House Counsel titled: Conducting Employee Background Checks: Navigating Current Rule. Here's the lead. In recent years, an ever-increasing number of employers are conducting some form of background checks on job applicants and employees. In fact, in a 2004 study, the Society for Human Resource Management reported that 96 percent of human resource professionals indicated that their companies conduct some form of reference checks on prospective hires. That number nearly doubled from 51 percent less than a decade ago. This is an excellent article and one that you should follow the link and read. It's the [...]
Start with the basics
The Christian Science Monitor says that "More companies are using sophisticated background checks to root out lies on résumés." What does that mean? Well, it depends on what you mean by "sophisticated." Most of the checking is pretty basic stuff. Here's a quick review of some things you can do. Start with a pre-interview phone screening. I like these because they're a very time-efficient way to clarify facts, identify issues for the interview and get a "gut sense" of the applicant. Not every company does it this way, but I think you should do some basic credential checking before you [...]
How much do applicants fib?
Your mother may have told you not to lie, but evidently some of the people sending out resumes never got that good advice. Several surveys indicate that lots of people lie when they apply for a job. One screening service used by employers reports that in 2006, 41 percent of their background checks turned up a discrepancy between what the applicant provided and what the reference reported. Another report, by a different company, found "major misstatements" on 42 percent of the resumes. More than half the hiring managers polled by CareerBuilder said they found a lie on an application. Of [...]