Employee screening and the damage done
Apologies to Neil Young for that title, but employee screening is a growing focus for businesses and governments alike, and it has the potential to reduce a great deal of damage and risk if done properly. From immigration concerns to retail loss prevention to national security, employers are taking much closer looks at the people they hire. What’s at stake may be pretty obvious, but what’s in place to facilitate the screening may not be ideal for the growing demand.
For example, consider illegal-immigration concerns. According to an AP article by Suzanne Gamboa, “16,727 employers check employees” using a federal system that has thus far screened around 1.7 million employees. With immigration such a hot-button issue in this election year, the feds want employers to “check all new hires within 18 months of [a new program’s] enactment, and check all other employees within three years.”
The problem is that the system has only been in place for a short time and may not be equipped to handle the roughly 140 million employees who will need to be screened. Gamboa cites a statement from Susan R. Meisinger, president of the Society for Human Resource Management who says that DHS “would have to sign up 20,000 employers a day” just to get access to all of those employees for screening.
In terms of fraud and loss prevention, employers also have a lot of ground to cover. A post on the Net Detective blog claims that employee screens for “criminal records checks yielded 9.1% hits, up from 8.5%” but that “almost 10% of people applying for work have a criminal record.” The biggest industries at risk, the post says, are construction and retail.
Employee screening for national security is crucial and gets even more complicated. In airport employee screening alone, there is a huge amount of uncertainty as to how to proceed. The House just introduced a bill to “create a pilot program to test 100% employee screening at five airports, at least two of which would have to be large hub airports” (according to Aviation Week).
However, estimates reported by Art Kosatka on Airport Business claim that airline employee screening can cost “as much as $1.5 million per year per door, coupled with an estimated overall annual economic impact on operations in excess of $12-15 million per airport,” and that’s only counting employees who have already passed a standard criminal background check.
With unemployment rates pretty low and Baby Boomers just beginning the process of retiring, there are a lot of potential employees out there who may need to be screened. Is the infrastructure in place to handle it all?
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