Employers can no longer rely solely on resumes and candidate interviews to make a sound hiring decision. While both are an important part of the recruitment process, neither accurately report past performance, behavior, and other risk factors that could make a candidate a potential bad hire for a company. Having a pre-screening, or pre-employment screening process in place will help illuminate any risk factors that may be present before hiring an individual to your team.

The 3 Benefits of Pre-Screening Candidates

There are many benefits of pre-screening a potential employee. Our team has collected the top three for you to consider when deciding whether or not to add a pre-screening component to your recruitment process.

1. A Rise in Quality Candidates

An overall improvement in the quality of applicants can be experienced when using a pre-screening process. By simply announcing to all applicants that background and past employment checks will be required as a part of the application process, you will discourage non-fit candidates from applying. The same is true for applicants who have been dishonest on their resumes. Nearly 51% of resumes contain inaccuracies in education, past job performance, and employment. When you pre-screen for these inaccuracies, you save yourself time by only focusing on recruiting quality, accurately-represented candidates. This mitigates the risk of a bad hire and, ultimately, drives up the quality of your talent pool.

2. A Short- and Long-term Cost Benefit 

The cost of a bad hire can be detrimental to a company, especially if you have had several in a short timeframe. Did you know that a bad hire can cost your company nearly 1.5 times the amount of the salary of the employee, and the multiple goes up the more senior the employee? In short, a bad hire is costly but can be avoided with a pre-screening process. The cost of implementing a pre-employment screening solution, like Triton, is minimal when compared to the statistic above. Furthermore, by screening out candidates ahead of the hiring process, you will save your team time. This leads to long-term gains financially through employee productivity optimization.

3. Mitigation of Non-Monetary Risk of a Bad Hire

A bad hire may cost a lot, but you can also lose a lot more than money if an inappropriate hire is made. For example, bad publicity for your company that causes severe damage to your reputation can be experienced. Lack of compliance can cause you to become in trouble with city and state, or provincial, governments, opening yourself up to lawsuits. Lastly, fraud and theft may also happen with a bad hire which decreases the morale of the workplace due to lack of trust from management and beyond.

Having a pre-screening  process in the recruitment of candidates in place can help you appoint the best person for the job, comply with employment laws, minimize the risk of fraud or theft, protect your company’s reputation and reduce the overall costs of recruiting for your team. If you’re interested in learning more about how to implement a solution for your company, Triton is happy to help discuss the best solution for you.