Last updated: October 2, 2023
Do you want to ensure you only hire the safest, most qualified, and most productive employees? Then performing a comprehensive and accurate background screening is already an essential part of your pre-employment hiring process.
If you don’t already include background screenings as part of the pre-employment hiring process, you may want to add them after you hear this. Studies show that one-third of all applications contain outright lies, and 3 out of ten business failures are caused by employee theft.
We provide extensive background screening, which helps thoroughly screen potential new hires to eliminate the type of people who are likely to cause problems within your organization through conflict, theft, or risky behavior. This helps to improve productivity and morale while reducing turnover.
Our background screening services include:
Criminal background checks
A criminal background check, also known as a rap sheet, is a comprehensive record of a person’s criminal history at the local, state, and federal levels. They contain information regarding the person’s name and known aliases, date of birth, address, photograph, identifying marks, and fingerprints.
Criminal records may include:
- Misdemeanor or felony convictions
- Past arrests
- Warrants
- Current pending
- Charges
- Dismissed charges
- Acquitted charges
Education verification
Verifying someone’s education is a quick way to identify whether or not an applicant has misrepresented themselves regarding schools attended, degrees earned, training received, or certification that they have obtained.
While it’s possible to obtain this information on your own, working with a third-party service allows you to avoid the time-consuming process normally involved when reaching out to a number of different schools or training facilities. Moreover, you won’t get caught up in the back and forth of wait times or other scenarios that slow the process down.
Driving records
Driving records are important if your employees operate company vehicles for insurance purposes of course. Your rates are going to be lower if your employees are safe drivers.
They may contain information such as:
- Driving records
- DUI or DWI convictions
- Citations
- Driving history
- License suspensions
- Traffic violations
- License revocations
- Speeding tickets
Social Security Number trace
Often the first step in a thorough background screening, a Social Security Number (SSN) Trace is an important accountability tool. It immediately assesses whether a potential employee’s SSN is valid, confirms that it matches the name and date of birth given, reveals aliases, and lists previous addresses associated with the person.
Revealing previous addresses is useful because it pinpoints other states, even countries, where background searches might be performed if necessary.
Credit reporting
Some employers only check credit reports if the job candidate will be handling money for the organization, say, if they’re filling an accounting or bookkeeping position. Others run credit checks on all potential new hires because they feel it is a reflection of how responsible a person is as a whole. That makes sense because, as a rule, if someone handles their debts responsibly, they’re typically someone that you can rely on.
Credit checks are an overview of how someone handles their debt and typically contain information such as:
- Types of accounts
- Dates accounts were opened
- Credit limits
- Loan totals
- Account balances
- Payment history
Employment verification
Employment verification is a valuable tool that can help you choose the right person for the job. Some employers handle this in-house, but it can become time-consuming—and, sometimes, frustrating. Having a third-party service, like ours, that regularly performs background screenings take over the process can speed things up.
Verifying employment confirms a job candidate’s past work history and gathers information such as:
- Job titles
- Responsibilities
- Dates of employment
- Job performance
- Reason for leaving
- Previous employment
- Skills
- Qualifications
- Disciplinary action
- Workplace behavior towards co-workers
This information is vital when narrowing down which applicant is the best candidate to fill the position.
Address verification
This process checks mailing addresses against an address database. If the address matches an address in the official database, it’s validated as real. Here, in the United States, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is the authoritative database for address lookups. It features over 160 million addresses.
International address verification involves reaching out to the address database within a specific country.
Put your trust in us
Whether you run a small, family-owned business, a Fortune 500 company, or a government organization, comprehensive background screening helps ensure that you only hire the best employees and keep the risky ones out, which allows you to thrive in today’s highly-competitive business environment.
USAMDT is committed to providing our customers with comprehensive background screenings that enable you to weed out potential problems in your workforce before they walk in the door.