If you’re an employer who needs to fill vacancies in your company, there are a few key guidelines that you should follow during the hiring process. Creating good policies for hiring will help you to hire the best possible team members and avoid legal problems. Here are two often overlooked but very important aspects of the hiring process that you should review carefully before you work on filling your next open position.
1. Perform a Credit Check on Job Applicants
Some employers may think that it isn’t necessary to perform a credit check on job applicants. You pay your employees and you don’t need them to pay you, so you may not really care about what their credit is like. However, good credit can make a job candidate seem more appealing than others. A stable credit history is reflective of a responsible and fiscally responsible person. If someone has an excessive number of delinquencies in their credit history, he or she may be more likely to be irresponsible with your company’s money or perhaps even more likely to be involved in instances of employee dishonesty. If someone is going to be closely involved with your company’s finances, it’s particularly important to know about his or her credit history. Use credit check services for employers that can help you to identify the best candidate for a position.
2. Be Knowledgeable and Train Your Staff About What not to Ask During Interviews
Some of the standard interview questions seem to be common knowledge because people have heard them so many times before. However, in wanting to learn more about a candidate, it’s possible that you or your staff may be asking some bad questions. Sometimes, employers may ask inappropriate questions for well-meaning or friendly intentions, such as asking someone about their family in order to establish rapport. However, certain lines of inquiry should never be featured in a job interview because they could be interpreted as discriminatory in nature. Questions that relate to someone’s membership in a constitutionally protected class are not legal, and it’s important to learn about illegal interview questions and train your staff on excluding them. Never ask an applicant about their marital or family status, age, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, country of origin, or disability. Companies’ that report their hiring statistics to the government may have questions on their job applications about race or disability, but they must include disclosures that the information will not be evaluated as a part of the hiring process and candidates do not have to answer them involuntarily.
