Part One 

Employees often have keys to your customer's homes enabling them to gain access to all of your clients' valuables! How far should you look into an employee's past when you accept their application? Do you call their references and former employers? Do you bother to check them out at all, or do you send them right out to clean based upon a vague "good feeling" you had about their presumed integrity?

Personal references do not provide sufficient objective information because naturally an applicant's references are going to say good things; otherwise, they would not have been listed. The best strategy is to hire a professional investigation service to perform a background check on the applicant. Such a service is relatively inexpensive (even though it can add up quickly if you do a lot of hiring), and it is money well spent.

Find a service you are comfortable with and use them to check every applicant, every time! Most businesses perform some type of criminal background check on applicants; however, the residential cleaning industry is especially vulnerable to employee theft. Sending a person with a history of theft into a customer's home unsupervised can be like sending a hungry child into a candy store!

Investigating your people during the hiring process can provide you with many restful nights of sleep instead of worrying about how safe your customers' valuables are. Many times the simple act of handing a criminal background check release form to an applicant with a criminal history results in the applicant suddenly deciding the job is not for them, or requesting to take the form home, which they almost never return! For just the cost of the paper form, you've saved yourself and possibly your customers a great deal of trouble and expense.

The main benefit of consistently conducting thorough criminal background checks is not so much in finding the people you do want to hire, but rather finding "out" the ones you would not want to hire! Believe it or not, cleaning service operators send out uninvestigated applicants everyday. Maybe sometimes the results turn out to be fine, but an incomplete background check could be a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.

All job interviewees show you their best side. You never gain an accurate picture of the person sitting across from you unless you dig deep into their past. In this age when lawsuits abound, we often have difficulty obtaining enough information from previous employers. In dealing with a large company, the time required to obtain valid information may not be sufficient for your hiring process. The number of negligent hiring and negligent retention lawsuits is increasing each year and can have a disastrous impact on your company's reputation and bottom line.

 What is negligent hiring? 

Employers have a duty to prevent crime and protect the public from the "foreseeable" acts of an employee and may be liable for facts that are known or "should have been known" regarding an employee's character or job-related experience.

 What does my company need to verify? 

Employers should verify any information solicited to determine an applicant's suitability for employment. In other words, if your company inquires about previous criminal convictions, educational achievement or a specific type of job-related experience, you have an obligation to verify that the information provided by the applicant is true.

 Is my company liable for anything that an employee does? 

Not necessarily! For example, if a proper criminal background check shows that an employee has never been convicted of an act of violence, then it is not "foreseeable" that he would commit violence at work. If, however, the employee has been convicted of domestic violence or assault and commits a violent act at work, the employer may be liable for the "foreseeable" act of such an employee.

If you have never done background checks and are not sure where to start, don't sweat it. Technology has made the process very easy. Look in the yellow pages or on the Internet. Interview several services just like you would any other service you would be purchasing, and be sure to ask about pricing. Most companies charge individually for each type of search. Ask what the turn around time is.

To gain an accurate picture of an applicant's history, Bill Parker, owner of USABACKGROUNDS.com recommends the following components of a good, thorough search.

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