The Value Proposition

The document destruction industry places more significant emphasis on security and integrity than almost any other. Fraud, identity theft and negligence lawsuits are just a few of the consequences of mishandled information. Your employees are entrusted with the confidentiality of your clients’ most sensitive information.

While no one can predict the future with certainty, in the event of an act of negligence on the job, you will be required to demonstrate that you performed reasonable due diligence in hiring that individual. Legal precedent is that if an employer "could have known," they "should have known" about past transgressions that should have disqualified an employee from the job. A reliable and consistently applied employment screening strategy will be a strong defense. What then constitutes a reliable screening strategy?

In the screening industry, literally thousands of vendors sell all kinds of products under the name "background check," and contradictory messages abound. How do you determine what messages are valid and what priorities should apply to your business and employees?

The earliest civilizations realized that starting a fire requires heat, fuel and oxygen; the absence of any one of the three means that you needn’t bother, as fire will not result. Similarly, it can be stated that three main elements are necessary for an effective background screening program: quality, low price and fast turnaround time.

While we take the elements of fire for granted in modern society, many organizations embark on an employment screening program with a critical misunderstanding of how the elements of an effective screening program fit together. Let’s look at these elements from a logical perspective.

We’ll come back to quality in a minute. Price and time are somewhat narrowly defined variables and very simple: They can be low (good) or high (bad). If all else is perceived equal, and you can choose between Vendor A, who is cheaper, and Vendor B, who is faster, some people will choose A, and some people will choose B. If vendor C then introduces a product that is cheaper and faster, everyone will have a strong incentive to choose C. These are generally accepted tenets of a free market economy. The simplicity of price and time in the free market means the third and more complex element, quality, is frequently ignored.

The most ambiguous and complicated of these elements is quality. One of the biggest misconceptions in the industry, and the equation that far too many vendors perpetuate, is that low price plus fast turnaround time equals quality. Quite the opposite is true. Quality is much more dynamic and, thus, harder to comprehend in a value proposition against price and time. Quality in a background check must be discussed as a combination of, but not limited to, the following brief overview of vital attributes:

If these quality attributes sound important, it should be obvious that quality often is directly correlated with price and turnaround time; that is to say, increasing quality requires commensurate increases in price and time. Once you begin to understand what quality in background screening means, you can then make a more educated decision as to what your organization’s value proposition for a background screening vendor should include.

It is important to note that if you are currently using an instant nationwide database check as the sole criminal history inquiry on your applicants and employees, you are using a product that is cheap and fast. This should raise a flag by now. While these searches can be used as a supplement to criminal research in county courts, they are not necessarily reliable as stand-alone products. (Please see the sidebar on p. 60 for more information on nationwide criminal database searches.)

We’ve discussed the three elements required for fire and paraphrased them as the three elements necessary to constitute an effective background screening program. Yet, a low price and fast turnaround time are still too compelling to ignore for many organizations, and if this results in a false perception of quality, the screening vendor has little incentive to correct it. Choosing your screening vendor based solely on price and turnaround time creates a risk that is immeasurable, but regularly perceived to be small. To help understand this risk, consider another three elements. All three don’t happen in succession every time, but like the proverbial perfect storm, you probably don’t want to be around when they do:

"Nationwide" databases should only be considered as a supplement to county criminal research to attempt to identify "vacation" criminal records. Depending on the position applied for and the level of responsibility or access the individual will have, additional screening services may be relevant.

With virtually any service product, organizations are naturally predisposed to be concerned with price and turnaround time. It is typically only when something bad happens that everyone is suddenly interested in the quality of your background screening program. If your organization believes background screening is worthwhile, do not leave quality out of your value proposition. A cheap, instant background check will provide little shelter in a perfect storm.