Today's society has created an environment that requires business owners to be armed with numerous tools. Many employers currently spend little time verifying the accuracy of employment applications and the cost of not doing normal due diligence can be staggering.

Consider:

An HVAC company recently paid $750,000 to a customer who was raped by a service technician. His employment application indicated no criminal convictions and the employer did not perform a complete background check.

An employee who had previously been convicted of passing bad checks forged signatures contracts. The court judged his employer negligent and awarded $175,000.

After driving for a telephone company for only a week, an employee was involved in a traffic accident. The jury learned that the company never saw the employee's driver's record which had five tickets within 18 months. They awarded the injured party $550,000.

Companies often don't adequately screen their new applicants. They should. Crooks and cons can cost your company a fortune.

Even if it were as simple as making an informed choice between a great service technician and one with an untrue work history, wouldn't a small investment be worth it. In today's business environment of easy access to computer systems and the proprietary information stored on them, even a temporary employee can wreak havoc on a company in a very short amount of time.

Corporate management has enormous pressure to hold employees to the highest ethical standards. Background checking cannot give employers everything they want but, there are data bases and sources for many other kinds of information; criminal data bases, sex-offender registries, workers

Bad hires can be devastating for a firm. Even a low level employee might mange to embezzle a few thousand dollars or drive away customers or at the l east consistently not show up for work costing you your hard earned customers business.

While it might be impossible to safeguard a company against every potential act of dishonesty, Hiring professionals can minimize the chances for unscrupulous behavior by understanding who it is they are really hiring. This means developing easy to institute background checking procedures that are utilized at all levels of the organization.

Stephen Spain, the COO of MECHdata that operates VERICRUIT, an online background checking service, recommends every new hire be screened at a minimum for driver's history, social security card verification and a local criminal history check. It is important to know who you are really hiring and this verifies the applicant is basically who they say they are. In this era of heightened concern about terrorism, theft and the risks involved with negligent hiring your need to be very careful about who is being brought into your business. Doing the proper due diligence on an applicant is critical to making informed decisions and building your firms business reputation.

Stephen Spain is the COO of MEPatWORK.com, an industry job board for HVAC, Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing trades. Spain collaborates with a team of experienced professionals to help job seekers and employers work together.

sspain@mepatwork.com