Pre-employment screening is a standard process for new hires in many companies. It helps build a team that the company can trust while mitigating risk and protecting its reputation. It also ensures a safe working environment for all employees while safeguarding it’s assets.

“We do about 16,000 criminality checks a month,” says Ambreen Hussin Alavi Head of Department of Commercial Operations and Culture at Tech Exon, a Human Risk Management company specialising in providing background verification services.

Though background screening can be as basic as ensuring that there are no outstanding criminal records of the employee, it can also include drug testing, academic, employment, social media and psychometric tests depending on how high up the food chain the position is. Furthermore, regulatory bodies such as the State Bank and the Securities and Exchange Commission expect companies to meet minimum compliance standards that require background verification of their employees.

Though background screening can be as basic as ensuring that there are no outstanding criminal records of the employee, it can also include drug testing, academic, employment, social media and psychometric tests depending on how high up the food chain the position is

Some companies opt to use open-source data to verify the information presented by the employee. Potential employees, while filling out an application for a job often have to sign a disclaimer that the information provided is correct to the best of their knowledge, which the company will verify. The verification comes in various forms:

Social media

Performed more for white-collar jobs social media screening checks the applicant’s presence on different platforms to ensure that the person is not part of groups that clash with the core beliefs of the hiring company.

With the applicants’ permission, a social media profile can yield information that may aid the hiring company in making a decision. While racism and aggression are all-around red flags, there may be other criteria that while socially acceptable, but may not gel well with the culture of the hiring company.

Academic

“Education certification can take up to 20 days depending on the issuing authority,” explains Ms Alavi. For verifying matric and intermediate degrees it can take longer because of the government process or it can take less in the case of private universities.

Giving a guesstimate, the Tech Exons employees say about 10-12pc of the academic checks performed by them for those going abroad turn out to be fraudulent while for those on the top rungs of organisations the number is much lower. Pharmaceutical is another sector where the incidence of fraudulent degrees is higher given the unnecessarily stringent requirements for sales personnel.

Criminal

“Imagine that you were part of a hit-and-run accident in Lahore,” says Ms Alavi. “The police station in Clifton would not have your records.”

A lot of information is in the form of photographs or in Urdu that makes searching records more challenging. Over the years Tech Exon’s database makes searching a click away, she claims. Given how many people have the same name, verification includes facial recognition. Using it, about 6-7pc of the cases that are verified have turned out to be fraudulent.

Employment

The place of previous employment, salary slip and tenure can all be verified as part of the screening process which can include calls to the supervisor, the previous human resource department, colleagues and references.

The purpose is to assess and evaluate behaviour, verify the reason for departure and confirm that it was as stated by the employee.

Other screening process includes psychometric tests and exercises by a panel of psychologists to evaluate leadership and management styles. Other than criminality checks, drug testing can also be carried out for the position of drivers. By partnering up with courier services, address checks are also undertaken all over Pakistan.

The global employment screening services market was valued at $4.06 billion in 2018, projected to reach $7.64bn by 2026, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 8.3 per cent from 2019 to 2026, estimates Businesswire, though it does not account for the pandemic.

Though background checks are part of the recruitment process of many companies, the focus is on meeting the base requirements.

Emphasising awareness rather than compliance, Ms Alavi stressed the importance of the ethical responsibility of employers to make the workplace secure. “We had a guard on whom we ran a background check and it turned out that he had a case of theft registered against him in the village where he was from. Imagine giving a gun to a man with a record of theft,” she said explaining that outsourcing security may absolve you of legal liability but not the ethical liability to make the workplace secure.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, August 30th, 2021