Some businesses might think employee compliance doesn’t begin until a new hire’s first day, but it starts as early as the hiring process. If your business isn’t compliant every step of the way, it can lead to fines, litigation and other risks.
Is your business maintaining employee compliance during the hiring process? We’ve pulled together several key steps to keep in mind:
Conduct Compliant Interviews
Asking the right interview questions can help you build your best team, as interviews offer insight into candidates’ personalities, skills and motivations for wanting to work for your business. Make sure you ask each candidate the same questions to ensure you’re completing fair, compliant interviews and evaluating all candidates in the same way to measure fit for the open role.
Beyond asking each candidate consistent questions, maintaining employee compliance also means avoiding illegal interview questions. According to employment law, asking candidates questions unrelated to the open position is illegal. These can include questions touching on such topics as age, family, gender, marriage, nationality and religion. While they might seem harmless and conversational, asking such questions can lead to lawsuits, fines and other legal action.
Complete Reference Checks
Candidate screening is critical to the hiring process because your business needs responsible and trustworthy team members. And an often overlooked screening step is completing reference checks. Many hiring managers might skip this step because it can be time consuming to ask the candidate for references, schedule calls and finally connect with the references.
Hireology makes the entire process easier on you, your candidates and their references. Candidates provide their reference contact information and surveys are automatically sent to each contact, saving time that would have otherwise been spent scheduling and completing calls. As part of the automated reference check process, candidates also waive liability for damages before the process begins, ensuring your organization and any contacts avoid litigation. And as an added security measure, IP addresses are collected from each reference and any duplicate addresses – whether from with the candidate or other references – are flagged for fraud.
Run Background Checks
In addition to reference checks, background checks offer you more assurance that each new employee you hire can be trusted. And this step can also be automated using Hireology. Candidates simply submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically. The platform helps you select the required background checks, obtains candidate authorization, verifies results and manages payment. It also emails candidates if they need to take any action, and you’ll be notified as well to cut down on manual task management. This results in accurate and timely turnaround of applicant screening results, eliminates errors and ensures each new hire can be fully vetted before you extend an offer.
If any red flags show up on a background check – such as a suspended driver’s license for a candidate applying to a role that requires driving – you can instead move forward with another candidate who has a clean record. An accurate background check report will provide peace of mind that each prospective employee has a history free from negligence or other activities that may put your customers – and business – at risk.
Support Digital Onboarding
Ensure a seamless transition between the hiring and onboarding processes by electronically assigning new hire paperwork immediately after making the hire. With digital onboarding, you can begin the process once a candidate accepts the job offer, by distributing and collecting all necessary documentation, including I-9 and W-4 forms, before day one. This way, new employees don’t have to sit in the HR office the entire first day filling out paperwork and can start contributing to the business right away.
Digital onboarding also helps your business maintain employee compliance by automating manual, error-prone processes and centralizing all new hire paperwork, helping you securely store sensitive information and easily access it in the event of an audit or litigation. This is much more streamlined than alternative options, such as using a variety of systems – emails, spreadsheets and more – to collect and store employee information.
Not only can following these steps help your business stay compliant, but it can lead to a more efficient hiring process, improved time to hire and increased time to productivity for new employees. For more information on maintaining employee compliance, visit Hireology.com/compliance. And to learn more about other key hiring steps, read our resource, “The 9 Elements of a Well-Oiled Hiring Process.”
