More than 1 in 4 employers do not conduct background checks of new employees

According to a survey done by CareerBuilder, most employers (72 percent) background check every new employee before they are hired. However, more than 1 in 4 employers (28 percent)  do not perform the check.

 

Another troubling fact is that 3 in 4 employers (75 percent) said they have hired the wrong person for a position. Of those who had a bad hire in the last year, that cost them nearly $17,000 on average.

 

“If an employee isn’t well-suited for the job or has a bad attitude, the time they spend not working could significantly impact your bottom line. That’s why it’s so important to make sure qualifications are substantiated,” said Ben Goldberg, CEO of Aurico, a CareerBuilder company. “It’s a hard cost to quantify, but it adds up when you consider the loss of employee morale, the additional supervision that employee needs, productivity loss for the organization, revenue that’s not being generated and client relationships that could be turning sour as a result of bad impressions.”

 

The survey was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder from August 11 to September 7, 2016. It included a sample of 2,379 hiring managers and human resources professionals, ages 18 and over (employed full-time, not self-employed, non-government), coming across different industries and company sizes in the private sector in the USA.

 

The survey also showed that among the 72 percent of employers that perform background checks, 55 percent drug test employees. Interestingly, only one in five (20 percent) continue to do so once an employee has been hired.

 

Employers that perform background checks analyze these aspects:

 

Criminal background: 82 percent

Confirm employment: 62 percent

Confirm identity: 60 percent

Confirm education: 50 percent

Check for illegal drug use: 44 percent

Check licensing: 38 percent

Credit check: 29 percent

 

Among those employers who had a bad hire, 37 percent said it was because the candidate lied about his/her qualifications. The most common ways they say a bad hire affected their business in the last year are:

 

Less productivity: 36 percent

Compromised quality of work: 33 percent

Affected employee morale negatively: 31 percent

Lost time to recruit and train another worker: 30 percent

Cost to recruit and train another worker: 30 percent

Employee’s managers or coworkers had to spend excessive time assisting bad hire: 29 percent

 

The average cost of a bad hire varies by company size, with companies with 500 or fewer employees having a $11,000 cost, companies with more than 500 employees have a $22,000 cost, while companies with more than 1,000 employees have a $24,000 cost.