Putting People First: Workplace Safety, Cybersecurity and Background Screenings

More than ever, having a smart, well-executed employment screening program is vital to ensuring workplace safety. Doing screening correctly helps organizations create safer environments for their employees, vendors and partners, as well as the communities they serve. This remains true for large and small organizations that are hiring through the COVID-19 crisis or looking ahead to hiring post-crisis.

But how can executives and managers know if their organization’s screening program is sufficiently comprehensive and thorough? Human resources leaders who seek answers to these questions must take the following three considerations when assessing and determining the best path forward.

Build on Preemployment Checks

Pre-hire background checks are an integral first step toward providing a safe and productive working environment. Conditioning permanent employment on passing a background check protects other employees and customers while also preserving the organization’s equipment, property and hard-earned reputation.

A preemployment screening often consists of a basic criminal background check, the verification of academic qualifications and work history, and a drug test. Depending on the role being filled, the person being offered a job will need to clear additional identity, health, fitness and financial checks.

These measures are effective for strengthening the reputability of the talent pool, but they do not catch post-employment infractions. Consequently, a growing number of organizations screen employees who have been on the job for some time. Organization are also contemplating whether to rescreen the employees they call back from COVID-19–related furloughs and layoffs.

Do Not Neglect Insider Threats, Especially When It Comes to Cybersecurity

Marc van Zadelhoff wrote in a Sept. 19, 2016, Harvard Business Review article that “the role that insiders play in the vulnerability of all sizes of corporations is massive and growing.” Almost exactly two years later, Tucker Bradley and a group of co-authors published these sobering statistics in a McKinsey report on data breaches:

• 50 percent of 7.800 publicly reported breaches between 2012 and 2017 involved insiders.
• Malicious intent accounted for 38 percent of breaches perpetrated by insiders.
• Some breaches led to hundreds of millions in loses for the affected organizations.

Clearly, nefarious actors who deliberately leverage positions of trust and access pose serious risks to an organization’s finances. There is a reputational price to be paid, as well.

A data breach sows doubt about an organization’s trustworthiness and capabilities among current and potential customers. An organization that fails to secure its data may also find it difficult to recruit quality candidates.

Of course, this is not to say that openness and collaboration are overall negatives for or detrimental to an organization. Rather, the broader point is that risks always need to be accurately assessed and, when possible, minimized. Thankfully, there are proactive screening strategies available to employers that help identify potentially troublesome employees.

And progress has been made. In 2011, the consulting firm then called Ernst & Young reported that the majority of data loss incidents resulted from the actions of internal users and (formerly) trusted third parties. That percentage ticked down when the McKinsey researchers performed their analysis half a decade later.

Reduce Risks Via Continuous Monitoring and Social Media Screening

The COVID-19 pandemic affected organizations in different ways. Many were forced to lay off or furlough staff. Others managed to preserve payroll but enacted hiring freezes. A small group of organizations needed to ramp up their hiring.

As my colleagues and I worked with clients who found themselves quickly hiring essential workers over recent months, we relied on our flexible technology platform and business processes to help them adjust and adapt their background screening programs. We are now in discussions with clients who have begun rehiring laid off employees and recalling employees from furloughs.

Continuous monitoring for criminal behavior and social media screening for risk and liability mitigation come up frequently in the course of these discussions. Further, periodic rescreening, done monthly or quarterly, is an option for employers who worry about insider threats.

Social media screening can be done during the preemployment period and during an employee’s tenure. An advanced social media screening program leverages machine learning guided by human oversight to assess publicly available online content in terms of how activities comport with the employer’s policies.

As a component of continuous monitoring, social media screening helps safeguard an organization’s reputation, identify indicators of toxic behavior and flag patterns or troubling activity that could affect an organization’s operations. One caveat is that implementing in-house solutions is not usually the best approach because social media screening will occupy valuable staff time and result in inconsistent collection and evaluation of data.

Another concern when considering continuous monitoring and periodic rescreening is ensuring that all procedures comply with the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Federal Trade Commission offer an online guide to FCRA compliance for employers.

Fostering a safe work environment takes on new dimensions as organizations, employees and customers emerge from the public health crisis. No single background screening program has ever proven equally effective for all employers, and the programs will now need to be tailored even more precisely. Screening and monitoring must take the broader workplace landscape and ever-evolving regulations into account. By leveraging available screening tools to properly assess and mitigate internal risks, an organization will put itself in a better position to provide a foundation of trust and safety for all the people it employs and serves.