Deep Background

More companies do post-hire “continuous screening” of employees

While 99% of businesses perform background checks on prospective employees before hiring them, just under 25% continue to screen them once they’re in the job.

That is the finding of a recent survey of executives from 278 companies with at least 100 employees, which was conducted by a “risk-monitoring” firm called Endera. Yet human-resource experts say an increasing number of businesses and government agencies are doing post-hire “continuous screening” on their employees.

“More organizations, especially in government or in highly regulated industries, are now adopting annual, semiannual or continuous, real-time, post-hire screening, which can reduce the prevalence of insider threats occurring throughout an employee’s tenure,” said an online article by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

The SHRM article cited as an example a company that is alerted to a fraud conviction of, say, its financial bookkeeper. (The article added that under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, organizations must obtain an employee’s consent to do long-term vetting.) One method for updating employee screening is to hire firms to do automated monitoring of criminal, civil, and licensing databases.

Another SHRM article said one supporter of continual employee vetting is Sue Weaver CAUSE, a group founded to promote aggressive employee due diligence in the wake of the 2001 murder of Cathy Sue Weaver in her Florida home by an air-conditioning worker who had not undergone a background check.

SHRM quoted Raj Ananthanpillai, CEO of IDentrix, a firm that searches online records to update employees’ risk profiles, as saying that “an arrest, a lawsuit or alarming financial behavior can be warning signs…One-and-done background checks don’t account for the dynamic nature of risk factors.”

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