As an employer or a business owner, you have a certain responsibility to your employees, customers, and clients to provide a safe place to work and conduct business. You lay the groundwork for a safe workplace with your hiring process and policies. If you want to ensure that your employees, customers, and clients feel safe when working and conducting business with you, you should make sure that your hiring process is excellent. Let’s look at a few ways you can create great hiring policies to ensure a safe workplace.
Cut No Corners
A workplace can become unsafe when job applicants are not sufficiently vetted and screened. This starts during the hiring process. The hiring process can feel overwhelming and daunting, especially if you are on a deadline to fill positions. When recruiters and employers start feeling a time crunch to fill positions, they may be tempted to cut corners. This is where unsafe individuals can slip in.
When corners are cut in any way during the hiring process, you immediately decrease the safety of the workplace. This is unfair to your current employees, your customers, clients, and yourself. In the long run, cutting corners will also cost you more than you wanted to pay.
Create a Thorough Hiring Policy
Your hiring policies should have thorough screening procedures in place. These screening procedures should proceed with other aspects of the hiring process. Many employers get this phase of the process backward. The first thing an applicant should do is pass a criminal background check. Many employers put this step at the very end of the hiring process. The danger of doing this is that if a hiring manager or recruiter is really impressed with someone’s resume, interview, and job experience, they could be tempted to overlook red flags in the background check. However, if the background check is placed at the beginning of the process, for instance even before an application will be accepted, then the recruiter will even avoid seeing the “impressive” information. Decisions can be made with more clarity.
Regardless of whether the background check happens first or last, it is imperative that you have a no-exceptions policy.
Make No Exceptions
It is essential that you make no exceptions when it comes to criminal activity. If the information turns up on a background check it must be taken seriously and it must be considered a threat to your company and to your employees. To ignore information on a background check is to purposefully put your employees, customers, and clients at risk. Make no exceptions. Criminal activity means no hire.
Other Considerations
A criminal background check will not be sufficient to weed out every applicant who poses a threat to your company. You should also take into consideration any red flags that pop up during the interview process. Even if these red flags seem indistinct, you should trust the recruiters or hiring managers who are in charge of the hiring process.
Even after an applicant has been hired, it is essential that employers listen to their other employees as well concerning suspicious or threatening behavior from other team members. This type of information should never be ignored. If you want to provide a safe environment for your workers and customers, you can’t be too careful.
Establishing a thorough hiring process for your company is an essential part of safety in your workplace. When your employees know that you take their safety seriously, they will also make the extra efforts to provide productivity and a positive work environment. It is a team effort to run a safe, effective business. Be sure you are doing your part during the hiring process.
