The IT world has a phrase “garbage in, garbage out”. The same concept applies to hiring new employees. If you do not put effort into selecting a new employee, then chances are you will be disappointed down the road.
In my 40+ years of loss prevention experience, I have investigated and interrogated a little over 2300 employees for theft. When you have seen that much theft, you begin to look at the source. Loss Prevention folks tend to be the ones catching the sludge coming out of the end of the pipe. We are dealing with employees that no one else can deal with. Normal management techniques do not work. So I began looking back up the pipeline, to the source. Loss Prevention starts at the time an applicant even thinks about putting in an application for work with your company.
Look at it as filtering out as many bad people as we possibly can in this process. When a person visits your business, in person or the employment page on your website to put in an application what do they see? It should be a clean image. Do you drug test? That wording or sign makes many folks that know they will not pass a drug screen turn around right there. So the filtering process has started.
Next, do they see that you will do a thorough background check? Criminal records check, credit check, education verification, sex offender register, driver’s license check (if applicable), previous employment verification and so on. A person with a clean “record” or with minor issues only, will not be concerned. However, the folks with poor records may simply move on. So we just filtered out more. These are people we are not interested in talking to and would be a waste of our time.
If you have our Applicant Management Center (AMC) solution, then the next step is that the candidate will fill out your custom application online. So instead of getting paper documents with handwriting that may be poor and full of inaccuracies, you are getting a file with data that you can read and respond to. One of the documents that can be included in this process is the release of background checks. Folks that have a bad record that thought you really might not check are now faced with signing a legal document. They know that if they lied on your AMC application, that you will find out. We just filtered out some more people we do not want to hire. The good folks can then attach their resume or any other documents you require.
With the Applicant Management Center, you get an organized, readable packet that you can review online and print out if necessary. I should mention at this point that the Applicant Management Center archives all of your applicant’s information. So you can go back even years later to retrieve the information.
Upon your review, you can email the applicant to set up a phone or in-person interview, ask questions or send a “no thank you, not interested note”. If you decide to go forward with an interview, then you should have already taken our personal, FREE, LIVE two-hour seminar:
Armed with the techniques we teach, you are better suited to get more truthful answers to your questions. For established Loss Prevention Systems customers, we conduct this training as reasonably often as you need it – free of charge. We train you how to set up the interview and how to ask questions. For example, an applicant most likely will tell you if they have stolen from previous employers. You just need to know how to ask.
Next in the filtering process is to actually run a background investigation. If you have our AMC, then all you do is click a box and the background checks begin. For example, if the checks you want include a drug screen then your applicant is contacted through email with a link to set up an appointment at a lab near them (we are Nationwide). Once that process is completed, then you receive the results automatically in AMC.
Criminal records checks would also start. We like to run a Social Security Number (SSN) Trace before we run criminal records. An SSN Trace is basically the “header” off of the applicant’s credit history. It does not provide any financial information. It does, however, give us the addresses where the person has lived. We can then check those jurisdictions for criminal records. That way, if the applicant omits a place they have lived where they have a criminal record, we should find it anyway. SSN Traces are VERY inexpensive to run. We do an actual “Court House” search, not some off-beat “database” masquerading as a records check. Many States allow for Statewide records checks (all counties & cities). But there are some that do not. At that point, we search County records.
So all of the checks have been run and as the results available in your Applicant Management Center are updated, you are notified. You can continue with the process, if necessary another interview, additional questions, job offer or letting the candidate know they have not been selected.
AMC is very inexpensive to onboard, our background checks very competitively priced with some of the fastest turnarounds in the industry. If you would like to try AMC, we will set you up for a FREE SIX MONTH TRIAL, no obligation. You would simply pay for any background checks you request along the way. However, you do not need to request any background checks to have our Applicant Management Center.
Contact us today for more information and to get started.
March is known for coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb. April showers bring May flowers but what in the world does May bring? May ushers in the summer sales season! Spring is wrapping up and now is the time to be getting your store ready for all of the shoppers looking for the items that will make the long, warm days of June, July and August a memorable time. The big stores are rolling out grills, picnic wares and yard games.
Holiday sales events and promotions are intended to boost retail sales. The obvious big event is the Christmas holiday season which seems to begin in October for many retailers. The event carries into January when merchandise goes clearance as retailers prepare for the next holiday event and the beginning of the Spring sales lines.
What do you do when a crisis occurs? Many people would say they take steps to address the crisis. Initially, that may sound like a good response unless you never planned on how you would react if that crisis were to take place. Think about it for a moment. If your business was on fire would you want firemen pulling up in their cars without the right gear or a plan of action of how they will take care of the fire? Sure it’s good to have the firemen there but if they don’t have the resources they need or a strategy on how to put out a house fire then the response is pointless. Police officers train on how to respond to a bank robbery in progress but the reality is many officers will never face that situation. According to a Cleveland Clinic Survey, 54% of Americans say they know CPR but the vast majority of us will never be called upon to use that training. So why do we do it? Why do we train for circumstances that are unlikely to ever confront us? We do it so we will be prepared for that one-in-a-million chance that we might have to apply that knowledge. President John F. Kennedy once said, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” Attempting to play it by ear should an emergency happen is not a plan and may even make a problem worse.
The scary shoplifting cases we hear and see on TV, or on newspapers in the United States, are becoming too commonplace to rendered us shocked. 
Recently, I conducted an employee theft investigation for a client. I want to share some of the findings from that investigation in the hopes that you can use it to review your own potential for losses. 
