- Jo Faragher
In a tight labour market, it’s tempting to do whatever you can as an employer to get people into roles. And as the latest survey from SterlingBackcheck proves, for too many this means they are failing to do sufficient background screening checks. More than a third do not check whether their potential staff have the right to work in the UK.
Its study also found that only 58% of organizations conduct any background screening checks on new hires – with the main reason not to check people out being cost. But when you consider that failing to carry out these checks could carry a £20,000 penalty for each illegal worker, paying for a few screening procedures seems like small change.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the companies least likely to carry out background checks or look at employees’ right to work in the UK are smaller, with fewer than 100 employees. But these organisations are also arguably the ones most likely to lose out, at least financially, if they receive a fine or discover that the worker has a history of fraud or theft.
It’s easy to see why some employers might be put off – it’s not always immediately obvious which workers hail from the European Union states (meaning they have rights to work), and outside (which means they must meet certain conditions), and processes such as applying for visas and checking they have the right skills to qualify can be time-consuming just at a time when you need someone to start work as soon as possible.
At the same time, we’re looking for people with more global experience; employees that can help bring in new cultural perspectives or business practices from overseas – without always having a consistent global policy in place on how we check things like their academic achievements, professional qualifications or reasons for leaving their last role.
It’s encouraging though that the study found that a quarter who currently do not do background screening plan to start doing so this year. With the political landscape uncertain as to whether the UK will stay within the European Union long term, recruiters and employers may have ever more complex hoops to jump through to hire skilled global workers in the future.