With the passage of time, it is getting increasingly critical and important for employers to run backgrounds checks on potential employees. In many cases, depending upon the type of business a company is involved in, for example, government contractors, it may be legally required. In other case, it may be needed for sound and secure business operations, for example IT and banking, or for the safety of customers, patients, kids, senior citizens and people with disabilities like in hospitals, daycare centers, long term care centers, Psychiatric clinics and rehabilitation centers. It may also be needed to avoid frivolous law suits, under many circumstances. As the world and workplace, and workplace laws and regulations are getting more and more complicated, running a background check on every potential employee continue to increase it’s value.
Law suites are another concern that may require Backgrounds checks.
Law suits are expensive and cumbersome. With the increasing power of media and public journalism, they can flush down the company’s hard earned reputation, within no time. It is extremely hard and expensive to re-build that reputation and trust. If you are an owner or CEO or in anyway responsible for a business or a company, trust me, this is the place, where you don’t want to be. They are such a big headache and too much of a trouble. Doesn’t matter what you do, they take a big chunk out of your time. Telephone calls, meetings with lawyers, court dates, negotiations, media, you have to deal with every thing. If you don’t, then it is perceived as your weakness and may hurt you in long run. In spite of all, that may be going on, you still have to keep a positive attitude and must always smile in front of people and cameras. You always have to come up with the perfect answer, as educated by your lawyers. I don’t know, how many times during this painful process, you will regret from the depth of your heart and say to yourself, “I must have run a background check”.
Many CEOs and executives, do not recognize the gravity of this issue. The matter of the fact is that you may consider yourself the most important person in the world and in your company and business, but, your employees are the face of your company. They create the first, and in many cases, only impression of your company. That is why receptionists, telephone operators, customer service personnel, and tech services have always been of critical importance in traditional companies. Unfortunately, in most contemporary models, due to so called financial and economic restraints, many companies are neglecting and over-looking these important factors. If you are Google, you may want to run your company with zero customer service. This is one of the reasons, I am not happy with the long term prospects of Google. It has absolutely no customer service culture and structure in place. By the time Google realizes this drawback and it’s competitors, surprisingly overlooking this critical target, so far, start targeting Google for it’s lake of customer and tech support, in their marketing and advertising campaigns, it will be way too late for Google to build a customer and tech support culture and structure from scratch, for this globally expanded huge company. As Google is expanding it’s business out of search business and getting involved in hardware, wireless, software, high-tech and computing, and is getting involved in head on competitions with customer service giants like, Microsoft, Dell, AT&T, Nokia and Samsung, this drawback of Google is likely to hit it really hard and is dreadfully breaking the long term prospects of this company, for me. In addition to this, contrary to search and PPC advertising, excellent customer and tech support are absolute requirements for these businesses and Google does not seem to realize this, yet. It is impossible to get long term loyal customers and mouth to mouth spread of word without good customer and tech support. Rather, a continuous negative feedback and opinion from your existing customers is very likely to make you end up like former telecommunication giant MCI-WorldCom. Most people and experts know, what started the downfall of MCI-WorldCom was not scandals, but, the worst customer and tech support led them to scandals.
In short, every employee of your company, represents your company. What ever happens up at the bottom, is representative of your company. Very few people know the executives and even fewer ever meet or interact with them. But, customers and visitors meet, deal and do business with employees every day or may be every second. The impression generated by these employees is the impression of your company. Dot coms and purely Internet companies may be recognized by their websites, writers and bloggers, as the media companies are by their anchor persons, and movie companies by actors, and music companies by singers and musicians. But, most brick and mortar companies are recognized by the employees people deal with every day. The way they talk, the way they deal with people, the way they greet. If they are honest? If they say thank you? Do they discriminate against me? Does any of them has a bad reputation in community? People make a note of all these things when they go to a grocery store, department store, bank, gas station, restaurant, etc. Of course different people have different preferences, ideologies, religions, lifestyles, and likes and dislikes. You cannot make everyone happy, hundred percent of times. But, there are standard customer satisfaction rates for every type of business that every business must meet, in order to survive and thrive.
Unfortunately, if anything untoward happens at your business or your company, then, people do not forget it for a long time. It becomes a hot topic in local media, really quick and depending upon the nature and severity of incidence, it may become a hot topic in state, national and even international media, too. Larger the scale, harder it is to deal with and restraints and burden it causes on your resources, in terms of human resources, time and money. Beside all this, the trauma caused to reputation, trust and good faith is even harder to repair.