Our employee screening philosophy is straightforward: in order to get a complete picture of a person, you need to consider their past, present, and future behaviors (we call this the Good Egg Screening Continuum®).
Most people understand what we mean by the "past"—think employment and education verification. Think criminal convictions.
When it comes to the "present," we're referring to how the person behaves today. A drug/alcohol test would provide a certain amount of insight. So would the person's current social media activity.
As for the future, it's exactly how it sounds—what will this person be doing six months from now? And will any of those activities or behaviors adversely affect the workplace or put the company at risk?
It's important to note that we don't advocate prying or invading someone's privacy. Instead, the goal is to have a better understanding of how a person's behaviors could affect the workplace, the company, and the brand. How many glasses of wine a person had at their wedding reception isn't the employer's business. But if the person is boasting on Twitter about drinking on the job? That does matter.
Rescreens vs. Continuous Monitoring
Screening for the past, present, and future involves a mix of pre-hire screens, post-hire rescreens, and ongoing monitoring. While most people are familiar with pre-hire screenings, employers are less sure of the difference between post-hire rescreens and ongoing monitoring. Both play critical roles regarding "future" behaviors that could affect your workplace.
So let's dive in and discuss the differences.
Rescreening essentially means that you're re-running at least one of the initial checks you did when you hired the person. Think criminal background checks, social media checks, motor vehicle record (MVR) checks, and drug/alcohol screenings. You wouldn't run a rescreen on something like employment verifications, because you already verified the past info—that information is static; it's not going to change.
If you run a criminal background check before you hire the candidate, you might rescreen the person after they've been an employee for a certain amount of time, just to make sure nothing has popped up in the interim. And this "interim" period will vary. Some companies might rescreen every six months; others might opt for every 12 months or 18 months.
Ongoing monitoring, on the other hand, happens continuously and alerts the employer as things come up.
The best way to illustrate the difference between rescreens and ongoing monitoring is through an example.
Let's say you interview a job candidate named Mike for a sales position that will involve him driving to meet with prospects and clients. Since Mike will be driving for your company, you run a pre-hire MVR check. It comes back clean, so you hire him. Your company policy is to run an MVR rescreen every six months. Mike "passes" his first rescreen—his driving record remains clean.
But three weeks after that rescreening, Mike is arrested for a DUI and he loses his license. He doesn't tell you. He continues showing up to work and driving to meetings.
A month later, Mike is in a serious car accident on his way to a client meeting—an accident that causes bodily injury to several people. Only then do you learn about Mike's suspended license and that he never should have been on the road in the first place.
We bet you can imagine what happens next: there will be lawsuits, not to mention untold damage done to your brand.
Now, if your company had been using MVR monitoring instead of rescreening every six months, you would have learned about Mike's suspended license when it happened—and that would have allowed you to address the situation, likely before tragedy struck.
We could draw similar illustrations for other ongoing monitoring services. For example, Claire is caught for credit card theft at the restaurant where she tends bar on the weekends. But the customer support center where she works full time during the week (and where she also handles customer credit cards) has no idea since they only run a pre-hire criminal check.
Or maybe Greg passed his initial social media check, but after four months, he and his girlfriend go through a bitter breakup and Greg explicitly threatens her publicly on Facebook and Instagram. Yet you—as the employer—have no idea, because you're only doing an initial social media screen or a yearly rescreen.
If you'd been using ongoing monitoring of these employees' criminal records and public online activities, you'd have been alerted of these issues quickly , which, again, would allow you to address these situations sooner rather than later.
Bottom line: Ongoing monitoring in the areas of criminal records, drugs/alcohol, MVR, and social media can help reduce risk and liabilities, including legal actions resulting from negligent retention and vicarious liability claims.
Now, we know what you might be thinking: since we're a screening provider, our goal is to "upsell" everyone to continuous screening packages. Not necessarily. The types of screenings your organization needs will depend on a variety of factors, such as number of employees, job types/titles, and the industry itself.
For example, an accounting organization with 1000 employees who handle sensitive financial information should use ongoing criminal monitoring due to the sensitive nature of the info employees handle day-to-day. But a marketing firm with 50 employees might opt to do only yearly criminal re-screens.
It's worth mentioning that very few employee-screening vendors provide "true" continuous monitoring (even though most will say that they do). As a result, their continuous monitoring "service" might not be robust or user-friendly enough. In order for continuous monitoring to be effective and economical, you must have a current, up-to-date employee roster—and an easy way for updating new hires and terminations in real time—not to mention powerful technology to conduct the ongoing monitoring.
At Good Egg, we do offer true continuous monitoring—and we've perfected the process so that it's streamlined and manageable for our customers and our customer success teams.
