It’s no surprise that most people agree upon one big mantra in business. And that mantra is that people make a business. Your colleagues and/or employees are the lifeblood of the day-to-day functioning of your business. Not only are they the main reason your business runs, but they also double as the representatives of your brand and company at large.
It is for this reason that hiring the right people becomes such an important factor when it comes to running a business. This is especially important when it comes to hiring for the C-suite or for positions of authority.
Just like you would do your research to see if a doctor has the requisite experience and expertise before trusting them with your life and health, you should make sure you mitigate and minimize risk when hiring someone to work for or with you. Naturally, it’s impossible to completely avoid bad or troublesome individuals that might be difficult to work with. That said, there are certain things you can do to avoid hiring someone that could cause detrimental and serious harm to the operations and spirit of your business.
What is Hiring Risk?
Over the years, you’ve surely heard stories and news about persons who have successfully managed to dupe superiors and clients into thinking they’re someone that they are not. Whether it’s lying on resumes or forging qualifications or faking character references, there really are a lot of people out there that will do anything to get a job, even if it means taking the nefarious route. This is essentially what hiring risk is.
Situations like this don’t just put your business at risk, it puts your clients at risk as well. Imagine you run a medical practice and one of your nurses has lied about his years of experience. This means that for as long as he works there, every patient that he has worked with has also been at risk on account of his lack of expertise. It is actually estimated that roughly 40% of people lie on their resumes and that almost 3 out of 4 employers have caught these applicants red-handed. While some discrepancies like date inaccuracies might be palatable, there are greater lies that can be a cause of much more significant risk.
Aside from affecting client relationships and client safety, a bad hire might have a massively negative impact on the office culture in your business. Colleagues and employees are people we have to work with or interact with on a semi-regular basis. That’s why it’s only normal for us to want to be able to trust or feel comfortable around the people we work with. For this reason, it’s crucial to hire persons that are trustworthy and enhance the good energy at your business. It’s vital to remember that it’s extremely difficult to work with someone you do not trust. It is for these reasons that mitigating or minimizing hiring risk becomes such an essential process.
Steps to Assess Hiring Risk
There are many steps to assessing hiring risk but it differs slightly from business to business. Broadly, it basically just means you and your team figure out a strategy that allows your company to prepare for and to lower the negative impact of any threats it might face. These threats may include dangers such as insider fraud, deceptive applicants or employees that could tarnish your reputation or compromise the safety of your business and your stakeholders. Having a good human resources team and a good human resources policy in place will greatly help you mitigate hiring risks in your business.
How to Minimize Hiring Risk?
Here are a few things that you can do in order to ensure that your hiring risk is as low as possible for your business.
- Have a strong and consistent policy when it comes to screening: For your hiring process, the most crucial aspect is having policies in place. We can’t stress on how important having a clear and tight background screening policy is. This policy should allow for documentation of the entire process from requesting to receiving to evaluating your background checks.
- Minimize the opportunities for internal fraud: While credit checks and character references might be useful at a basic level, you should also look into services and companies that offer more background checks over and above these in order to ensure you’re hiring the right person for your business.
- Go through regulatory compliances: There are certain governmental checks that jobs require in order for a candidate to be hired. Make use of these. Especially if you’re hiring for a role that is in the medical field or work that relates to children.
- Have clear pre-hiring screening criteria: While releasing job opportunities to the world, ensure that your own requirements are clear and of a high standard. Having overly open hiring opportunities leaves room for anyone and everyone to apply to work at your business. Stricter requirements, within reason, make sure that only the people that are genuinely good fits for the role apply for the job.
- Have training sessions: Even after you hire a seemingly great employee, training them goes a long way. It immerses them in the culture of the company and familiarises them with the type of work that they will be engaged in. It also lets them interact with the people that they are going to be working alongside. All of this becomes very useful for you to assess whether they will work out long-term or are a good fit in your company.
Conclusion
Although we’ve provided you with many steps and advice on how to mitigate hiring risk, the only real way to test it out is to start hiring people. Don’t be discouraged if you come across a few bad apples initially. Count on the fact that with time and practice, you will be able to weed out problematic or dangerous applicants much faster and get one step closer to creating the workplace or business that you’ve always dreamed of!
