A guide to Screening Suitability

Pre-employment vetting & screening takes on many guises, but believe it or not, it is also totally ignored, let's understand as to what, if anything, is undertaken & if none at all, why not?

Employment screening encompasses the measures involved in deciding an individual's appropriateness to embrace employment in a given position. This is not restricted to 'starters', in an organisation but also employees who are moving within a company as well as those that have been in post for some time too. A suitable level of screening, informed by a role based risk assessment, should be applied to all individuals who are provided access to organisational assets including permanent, temporary and contract workers.

· Not all roles necessarily require the same level of screening.

· Checks may include: Identity; nationality and immigration status; right to work; employment and education history; criminal records, financial; overseas checks; personal references; open source and social media assessment.

A suitable level of screening should be applied to all individuals who are provided access to organisational assets including permanent, temporary and contract workers.

Appropriate screening measures help to provide cost effective and legally compliant assurance that only the right people, in the right job roles, are working within your organisation.

The application of screening measures will vary across organisations and across job roles. Basing screening decisions on thorough security risk assessments will ensure that any measures adopted will be proportionate to the risks and make best use of valuable resources.

185,578 cases were recorded in 2020, which is a 17% reduction compared to 2019. However, the first six months of 2021 do show a 11% increase on the same period in 2020.

A large proportion of identity fraud victims were aged between 31 and 40 years and 51+. (CIFAS FRAUDSCAPE 2021)

INSIDER THREAT 290 individuals were recorded to the IFD in 2020 compared to 432 in 2019. However, the pandemic has limited recruitment and new risks have emerged with remote working. The pandemic has had a significant impact on employment, with 693,000 payroll jobs lost since March 2020. Dishonest actions remained the highest reported case type, accounting for 44% of cases. Cases recorded for unlawful obtaining or disclosure of personal data have risen by 43%. The individuals involved tended to be aged between 31 and 40 years and working in a branch or a store.

Whilst accepting pre employment vetting & screening is sometimes difficult as a whole we don’t make it easy for ourselves, the Pandemic obviously has played a part but Prospects Hedd, the degree fraud service run by Jisk, is warning students that sharing photos of graduation certificates on social media drives the multi-million pound trade in fake degrees.

Graduation season is a lucrative period for counterfeiters who scour social media sites for the latest degree certificate designs, which are unique to a particular university and year.

Students sharing photos of certificates make forgeries based on the latest logos, crests, signatories, stamps, holograms and wording easy. Fake, often advertised as ‘novelty’, graduation certificates can be picked up on trading sites such as eBay for a few pounds. This just shows how difficult it can be, would you recognise a genuine degree certificate from a fake?

As things begin to return to normal, many employers now find that a much wider pool of potential employees exists in locations from which a daily commute would be impractical. Digital technologies for employee identity verification and pre-employment screening can remove many of the risks that might have been a concern to employers before but please ensure you undertake some form of pre employment vetting/screening it’s a dark world out there that can only be made darker by rogue employees.