Employment Verification Best Practices: Verifying the Employment History of a Temporary Worker

Employment Verification Best Practices: Verifying the Employment History of a Temporary Worker

Have you ever wondered how you can improve the turnaround time for your background reports?  Onboarding can be a difficult and expensive process. You cannot afford a delay in the completion of the background check. Unfortunately, your candidates may be overlooking a minor but important detail that could be negatively impacting your organization’s turnaround time for your background reports. This detail could be making you less competitive and creating a frustrating, inefficient onboarding process for you and your candidates. The detail they are missing: failing to provide the name of the staffing agency with which they were employed.

The Proliferation of Contract and Temporary Work

Temporary hiring has become a permanent fixture in today’s labor market.  A quarterly survey conducted by the American Staffing Association found that “U.S. staffing companies employed an average of 3.13 million temporary and contract workers per week in the first quarter of 2015, up 5.5% from the same period in 2014.” Additionally, according to a recent CareerBuilder study, “nearly half (46 percent) of employers reported that they plan to hire temporary or contract workers this year, an increase of 4 percentage points over last year.” What this means is that employers can expect to see more candidates with temporary work history applying for positions at their organization. Therefore, what are the implications for employers when attempting to verify the job history of a temporary worker?

Verifying the Employment History of a Temporary Worker

Generally speaking, temporary and contract employees are not on the host employer’s payroll. To verify the work history of a temporary candidate, employers must submit their request to the agency that employed the candidate. This is crucial, because you could waste valuable time trying to contact the host employer, leading to delays.

3 Ways to Avoid Delays in Temporary Work History Verifications

The following are a few best practices for verifying the work history of a temporary employee to avoid delays in the processing of your background report:

  • Provide the name of the staffing agency.  Temporary candidates typically are not on the host employer’s payroll. Therefore, to avoid delays, your temporary employee should provide you with the name of any and all staffing agencies that paid them. 
  • Review your employment application.  It is a good practice to provide additional fields on your employment application specifically for listing agency or contract employment.
  • Communicate with your candidate.  To help make the onboarding process go smoothly, talk with your candidate beforehand about the background check process to prevent any surprises.  Keeping them informed will help avoid confusion and prevent delays.

Temporary worker employment verifications can extend the background check process. As an employer, however, there are a few things you can control that can positively impact the turnaround time of your background check reports. As the diagram demonstrates, making a few changes to your process and improving communication with your candidates can make a big difference in reducing the total number of steps in the process. The end result: more hires in less time.
 

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Editor’s Note: This article features contributions from Jaclyn Hale, Reference Investigator at PreCheck.