Negligent Hiring: What Every Owner Needs to Know About How to Properly Evaluate Employees

Negligent Hiring:
What Every Owner Needs to Know About How to Properly Evaluate Employees
by Chris Felicijan
Owner, Pinnacle Investigations

Due diligence should be considered a critical aspect of the hiring procedure, and savvy business owners are aware of this. In the United States 16% of the population has criminal records, and one of every six job applicants has a drug problem. Applications are falsified 40% of the time, and murder is the third leading cause of death on the job. Employers lose 72% of negligent hiring lawsuits, and the average award is in excess of one million dollars! If you put the wrong employee in contact with vulnerable co-workers or customers plan on paying out some serious cash, increasing insurance premiums, and losing the confidence and business of customers. You can pay for a lot of “quality” background investigations if one considers the costs resulting from one inappropriately placed individual.

State fingerprint records are seriously flawed and don’t give you complete records because they only show convictions for their specific states. Only 10 states list 100% of dispositions after five years. Plea agreements, arrests, dismissal reasons, original charges, warrants, deferrals, and other judicial information cannot be listed on conviction records, but are critical in making good hiring choices. Many crimes, such as drug charges and theft, no longer utilize the fingerprint process. In addition, the states only check the name given to them, so if someone uses an alias the check is worthless. The FBI gets its records from states, so they have the same flaws on a greater scale.

Many employers think instant Internet screening companies that utilize stored data area good choice because they claim to have “millions of records,” but in background investigations, quality, not quantity, is key. The FTC reported that “an employment screening service that uses stored data (which may be as much as 90 days old) does not comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act Section 613(2).” Since the repository is not updated daily, searches cannot be used to reliably search criminal records. As with fingerprint checks, these companies check only conviction records that we already know are inadequate for protecting a business from negligence lawsuits.

So how can a company find out about the employees they are working with? You need to start with Social Security verification to trace and develop a history of the individual’s permanent addresses. Next, uncover all of the aliases, maiden and married names associated with the applicant, and then investigate all of the county records associated with those names and aliases. There are over 3200 counties in the United States, and there is no single database (online, fingerprint, or otherwise) that will check for criminal records for each county. If anyone tells you that they conduct a national online court search for all counties, they are lying! The bottom line is that owners need to get current county records from every place a person has lived. This will provide arrest data, original charges, warrants, dismissals, and deferred sentences that can be missed by state fingerprint criminal records checks.

There are other levels of due diligence, and the background investigation must be appropriately paired with the job position, i.e. civil records, domestic violence, restraining orders, certifications, employment verifications, reference checks, and developed references, etc. Background checks should be done every other year, and employees with odd behaviors should be investigated immediately.

Due diligence is not an easy river to wade through. However, with the proper help, companies can protect their organization, staff, and customers from catastrophe. Owners need to dedicate themselves to doing what is necessary to protect their businesses. You just have to know what to look for and what questions to ask.

Chris Felicijan is the owner of the 100% woman-owned corporation, Pinnacle Investigations. Pinnacle is a national firm providing employee background and full service investigations for corporations, banks, healthcare agencies, educational institutions, non-profits, top security federal agencies, etc. so that issues of negligent hiring are minimized and owners can feel safe in their hiring choices. Pinnacle Investigations also provides educational seminars dealing with negligent hiring, security, and sexual harassment issues. Chris and her partner, Sandy can be reached at 800-955-5306 and the web site is www.pinnacleprof.com.

The information contained in this article is intended to be authoritative and accurate information on the subject matter contained in the article at the time of submission for publication. It is distributed with the understanding that Pinnacle Investigations is not rendering legal advice and assumes no liability whatsoever in connection with its use.