Lessons from the federal government
The Federal Drive, a show on Federal News Radio recently offered the following advice to job seekers: Background check in your future? Don’t lie! One of the things that I got out of the material is the difference between the federal government and other employers.
The show included comments from Debra Roth. She’s a partner in the firm of Shaw, Bransford and Roth, that specializes in Federal employment law. Here’s just one comment. “Lying to the federal government almost always, in current times, will get you criminal charges.”
That’s probably not true for your company. The biggest stick you’ve got is that lying on an application is cause for termination. But there is something that the feds do can make your hiring and background check process more effective.
The government uses questionnaires to gather information. That’s a good process for two reasons.
First, it assures that you ask the same questions in the same way every time. And the answers will be in the applicants own handwriting, so there’s no chance of “misquoting” as can happen when you ask the questions in an interview and write down the response.
Here’s another idea you can use. The feds use two different questionnaires.
There’s form SF 86 (Questionnaire for National Security Positions) and form SF 85 (Questionnaire for Non-sensitive Positions). You can do something similar.
Obviously, you don’t have any “national security positions” at your organization. But you do have positions with access to money or to confidential records.
Creating separate forms and process for sensitive (access […]
The danger of not checking
PI Newswire, a news service for private investigators, splashed the following headline across the screen of my computer. Jury Finds Housing Authority Negligent in Elderly Woman’s Murder after Tenant Background Check Misses Neighbor’s Criminal Past. Here’s part of the lead.
A jury recently ruled that negligence by the Housing Authority in a North Carolina city led to an elderly woman’s death at the hands of her crack cocaine addicted neighbor in 2007.
The sons of the woman asked for more than $10 million in damages. The “negligence” was not conducting a proper background check on the neighbor. If you’re a landlord or you hire people, there are three lessons about background checks you can learn from this story.
You can be sued for not conducting a proper background check if a person you select as a tenant or a person you hire commits a crime of violence. If you lose the case, the award could be huge.
“Proper” means doing a check using a reputable service like SentryLink that offers national coverage. The Housing Authority did a background check, but it was only of North Carolina records.
You should have a standard procedure to check out prospective tenants and employees. If you don’t, put that at the top of your To Do list. Your procedure should include background checks and other steps to keep the dangerous and deceitful away from the good people who rent from you or work for you.
Once you have a procedure, follow it. Use checklists and other simple […]
Organizational justice
The April 2010 issue of Risk Management has a great article titled: Finding and Fixing Corporate Misconduct. After noting reports that misconduct had declined during 2009, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) says the following.
According to the results from more than 300,000 employees in over 75 countries, this “decline” in misconduct during 2009 is actually misleading, as it pertains to less severe and risky behaviors such as the misuse of company resources or other ‘inappropriate behavior.’
In other words, no matter what you may have heard, there’s pretty good evidence that more serious forms of misconduct actually increased last year. What can you do about it?
The CEB says that you want to create a “culture of integrity.” And the most important thing to count on is what they call “Organizational Justice.” Basically, it’s the perception among employees that you mean business about your standards and rules.
The CEB suggests three steps for creating an atmosphere of organizational justice. Here they are with my idea of what that means in an everyday, practical sense.
(1) Equip managers to decisively deal with unethical behavior.
Equipping managers means giving them the tools to hire smart, including a background check for any position of trust and pre-employment or routine credit checks for appropriate positions. It also means supporting managers when they make tough calls.
That’s the sort of thing you read often on this blog. But the CEB’s next two steps are also important and don’t get nearly enough attention.
(2) Show the whole employee population-using real instances from […]
Why are they publishing those awful stories?
If you spend time online or watching television, you could get the idea that the media don’t want you to use credit checks as part of your hiring process. Here are two examples.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article titled: Bad Credit Derails Job Seekers. The lead told the story of Rosa, a single mother of three, who wasn’t hired because of (she thinks) a poor credit report.
MNBC had Bad Credit Sidelines Some Jobless Workers. They led with the story of a woman who “believes an unpaid medical bill cost her a full-time job.”
You’re going to see more stories like those two. And they come at a time when state legislatures are considering legislation that would ban the use of credit reports in hiring. There are three reasons why the media run stories like this.
It’s a feeding frenzy. When one medium is successful with a story, others crank out similar stories.
The media loves human interest stories, especially where the villain is a business of some kind and the victim can be portrayed as helpless. People read stories like that. They lure advertising which is how most media make their money.
Those are two reasons. You can’t do anything about either one.
But, there’s a legitimate issue here. The two stories above tell us that they let the report make the hiring decision.
If that’s true, then, if either business had dug into the reason for the poor credit report, they would have discovered issues that had nothing to do with responsibility. […]
It takes a village to catch corporate fraud
The question, “Who blows the whistle on corporate fraud?” is also the title of an article that will be published in the Journal of Finance. To find the answer, the authors studied “all reported fraud cases in large U.S. companies between 1996 and 2004.” Here’s the answer they came up with.
“We find that fraud detection does not rely on standard corporate governance actors (investors, SEC, and auditors), but takes a village, including several non-traditional players (employees, media, and industry regulators).”
That’s good news. It means that you’ve probably got honest employees on the payroll who may spot fraud, even if the government or the board of directors can’t do it.
But there’s also bad news here. Whistle-blowers are a rare breed indeed. Whistle-blowing is an act that takes courage. Many whistle-blowers suffer some kind of reprisal. So for one of your people to catch fraud they have to be honest, placed in a position where they can spot the fraud, able to identify it, and brave enough to bring it to your attention.
And you have no way of knowing how long fraud will go on before it gets caught. It might be only a little while. But it might be years.
So while that village might be your best bet to detect fraud, that’s just shouting “the horse is loose” after the horse is out of the barn and running hard. If you want to cut your fraud losses, prevention beats detection every time. There are three steps.
Hire smart. Use criminal […]
Lessons from Sandra Bullock
Normally, the world of screening and security has me reading reports on fraud and stupid corporate stunts. Every now and then, though, my Google Alerts throw something juicier up on my screen. That’s what happened this week.
A blog named MomLogic published a post by Dr. Wendy Walsh with the title, “Sandra Didn’t Believe the Background Check.” The supermarket tabloids could not have done better.
Here are the basics of the tawdry story. When Sandra Bullock met Jesse James, her tattoo-sporting, biker husband, he was married, for the second time. His wife was pregnant. He had two children by his first wife.
Now several women have come forward claiming affairs with Jesse. Sandra Bullock is consulting divorce attorneys.
There’s no reference in the blog post to any actual background check. So what does one more Hollywood divorce have to do with background checks and with you? Here’s the answer from Dr. Walsh.
“It’s an old adage, but: If you want to predict someone’s future behavior, look no further than their past behavior. As Sigmund Freud so brilliantly observed, ‘Human beings have a compulsion to repeat.'”
That’s one reason we do background checks. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Background checks help you discover any past behavior that an applicant might not willingly share.
This is especially important when it looks like you’ve got just the right person and get excited about it. When that person looks like they might be the perfect employee or tenant it’s easy to get excited and overlook things.
That’s […]