Background Check Blog

When you’re working actively to recruit for a busy healthcare organization, you need to fill positions quickly. Whether you’re replacing retiring nurses or you need to add new staff to meet higher demand due to the latest COVID-19 variant, time is of the essence. Critical to your hiring strategy is an efficient background screening process. You need refined policies and processes to help you request background checks and get results without delay. However, as important as speed is to your hiring process, there are other important factors, such as accuracy, compliance, and comprehensiveness. You’ll need to balance all of these factors to fill open positions quickly and meet your goals for delivering excellent patient care.

As an employer, you already see the benefits of employee background screening in action. It helps you make well-informed hiring decisions and manage hiring risks for your organization.  But for candidates, the prospect of an employment background check may be a source of worry, frustration, or even confusion. Candidates may not understand what is involved in a background check, their rights, or how the information yielded from a background check can influence their employment opportunities. Based on what candidates know about background checks or what they’ve experienced in the past with other employers, it can be challenging for them to undergo background screening with your company. However, by taking deliberate steps to clarify the background screening process, you can keep candidates informed and help them navigate the screening process successfully.

The healthcare professionals who join your organization must be fully capable of performing their job duties, and to do so, they need more than the required credentials. In addition to possessing the necessary experience and qualifications, prospective employees must also be free of drugs that could impair their performance and potentially endanger patients. As a result, comprehensive background and drug screening are critical elements of a healthy and compliant hiring process. Though the terms drug screening and drug testing are used interchangeably, they can mean different things and result in different outcomes affecting your hiring process. To operate a quality employment screening program, you should understand the difference between drug screening versus drug testing, and when to use each.

Accuracy in background screening is critical to your hiring process. Without it, you’re wasting valuable time and financial resources, and you’re increasing hiring risk.  An accurate background check provides you with the assurance you’ve taken extra steps to understand the people you hire and protect your customers, patients, and workforce. However, selecting just any background screening provider doesn’t guarantee accuracy. In fact, it may even result in hiring decisions based on erroneous or incomplete background information.

When assessing the value you receive from your background check provider, you need to look at more than the services you receive in exchange for your upfront financial investment. In fact, most screening companies provide the basic services of background screening—criminal checks, records search, and verifications, just to name a few. But to know if you are getting real value, you need to look beyond those basic services.