Effective Pre-Employment Screening in the IT Industry

Introduction: The Case for Pre-Employment Screening

Today's demographic, economic, and technological developments have created a recruitment landscape fraught not only with opportunities but also with significant challenges. It is far easier today for potential employees to fabricate information — ranging from the personal to the professional. For this reason, it is vital that companies, especially in the IT industry, weed out fraudulent applications to ensure that they employ the best candidates from their applicant pool.

It is also true that applicants sometimes simply omit pertinent information that might be detrimental to a company, such as a criminal past or problematic behavior in society or at previous workplaces. These omissions are often more difficult to identify, but no less important to address than outright fabrications regarding experience or education.

Many experts point out that failing to use a pre-employment screening process is highly detrimental to a company — not only in terms of potential harm to the organization, its employees, or its customers, but also in terms of employee turnover and the costs of recruitment and training when a poor hire eventually reveals problems. For this reason, the following proposal aims to streamline the recruitment process and identify screening techniques most useful for an IT company's particular circumstances. One of the most useful techniques identified is cross-referencing, as suggested by Bonanni et al. (2006). Important additional considerations include legal issues such as employee rights and consent under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, as discussed by Laws.com (2013).

Cross-Referencing as an Evolving Screening Technique

Bonanni et al. (2006, p. 6) suggest that cross-referencing may be the next step in the evolution of pre-employment screening. While individual techniques such as background checks, employment verification, and criminal record checks each carry their own risk-detection rates, using them in combination significantly raises the overall risk estimate for a given applicant. In other words, a high-risk employee may only be identified as such when multiple screening tools are used together.

Specifically, the authors state that any single screening tool produces a "not clear" rate of approximately 10%, while a combination of four screening tools raises this figure to approximately 46%. Consequently, for identifying the best and lowest-risk candidates for top-level positions, this cross-referencing approach is a highly effective technique to adopt.

Tiered Screening Based on Employment Level

The level of the position being recruited for is also an important consideration. Many IT companies currently use a single recruiting approach for all employees — from entry-level data entry professionals to senior managers — applying the same interview questions, personality tests, and background checks uniformly across all roles.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC, 2008) recommends a risk-focused approach when determining the appropriate level of pre-employment screening. For lower-level employees, simpler measures such as personality tests, standard interview questions, and basic background checks may be sufficient. For more senior positions where greater responsibility is required, a more integrated approach is warranted. Aligning pre-employment screening techniques with the level of the position being filled is therefore a sound and defensible strategy.