What You Know Can’t Hurt You
by Allison Gross

September 11th changed everything. Nothing – certainly nothing pertaining to security – will ever be the same. This new thinking about security has filtered down to every industry including tech support. In line with these changing security perceptions, companies must rethink the importance of background checks for support applicants.

While most employees are productive and contribute to your company's success, background investigations can keep out those occasional problem workers. As some support centers have found out – most of them too late – it’s much less expensive to do a background check than to deal with the disruptions, liability issues, and financial impact that typically result from hiring the wrong person.

When we need to hire support people, many of us rush through the process, because, let’s face it, we need bodies in those seats. But hiring without the proper pre-employment screening could result in serious problems that cost more in time, trouble, and money than leaving the seat open a little longer. Not to mention, of course, liability issues such as violence or criminal activities.

At a recent industry meeting, one support center manager relayed this experience. He said that at one time, he was fed up with having to cancel job offers to applicants he liked in interviews, just because they scored poorly on background checks. So he quit checking. The horror story that followed clearly illustrates the folly of that practice. The manager pointed to a recent newspaper article about the man who kidnapped his ex-wife and locked her in the trunk of her car. He said that man was the last guy he hired! The moral: A background check that costs less than $25 and a few days can sometimes save a company the thousands it costs to replace a bad match, or the legal fees to defend against liability lawsuits for negligence in hiring a troubled or troublesome employee.

You can look at background test results as black-and-white. Security experts will tell you that the past is a very strong indicator of the future. How people handle their lives in the areas of education, obeying the law, driving, credit, and employment history is how they’re most likely to handle the future.

For employers, there’s little liability when they check potential employees. One reason for this is that background checks are considered consumer reports, which fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Applicants sign a release approving the background check, and the employer agrees to abide by the terms of the act before the background company provides information. Even if the information is wrong, as long as it isn’t used to unfairly deny an applicant a job, the employer can’t be held responsible for incorrect information, as long as human error was to blame and action was taken to correct the misinformation.

Lying on a resume or application about education or job history is the most common problem uncovered in background checks. And, of course, this type of action is hardly restricted to applicants in the support industry. For example:

• Notre Dame football coach George O'Leary resigned after it was revealed that he falsified information about his education and playing career.
• Janet Cooke, from The Washington Post, used fake educational credentials to get hired. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story that was untrue. She resigned, and The Post returned the prize.
• Kenneth Lonchar, CFO of Veritas Software Corporation, was fired for stating on his resume that he had a Master's Degree from Stanford University when, in reality, he did not have an MBA.

Simple background investigations would have found these out and saved the companies time, money, and embarrassment. Some estimates are that 30% to 40% of all job applications and resumes include some false or inflated facts. These figures should make you at least a bit wary of accepting anyone’s word at face value.
You should have the criminal background standard assessment in place in your company. This would help alleviate two common mistakes: inconsistent hiring policies at multi-location companies, and the failure of small companies to document specific hiring criteria. In multi-location companies, there’s a constant danger that one site will interpret the same result of a background check differently than another -- that can invite litigation. The solution? To have a system that rates the results, eliminating hiring discrepancies.

This problem isn’t limited to companies of any size or industry but more than half of companies with fewer than 100 employees don't have established policies and procedures describing criteria for new hires. Especially in the high-stress world in which we operate, filling the seat takes precedence, rather than filling the seat with the right person. And this is a tendency that we have to train ourselves to guard against.

A study conducted by the American Management Association reported various losses to U.S. business due to felonies:
• Employee pilferage - over $10 billion
• Commercial bribery - over $10 billion
• Computer fraud - over $1Billion
• Embezzlement - over $4 billion
• Vandalism - over 2.5 billion
• Burglary - over $2.5 billion
• Insurance/Workers Compensation fraud - over $2 billion
• Shoplifting - over $2 billion
• Arson - over $1.3 billion

If you’re a manager, one of your primary jobs is getting people into those support seats. But – in light of statistics such as these, and the fact that our world was changed forever on September 11 - shouldn’t you be getting the right people into those seats? After all, your performance gets judged, too.

Allison Gross is Regional Director of Comforce Corporation www.comforce.com, a $400 million public company involved in consulting and staffing for the call center industry. Based in Atlanta, GA, she works closely with major call centers all over the country, among them BellSouth, MBNA, and UPS, as well as numerous clients in the telecom, financial, hospitality, technology, and transportation industries. Allison Gross can be reached at (678) 812-2234, or at agross@comforce.com.