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If you’re new to rescreening, sometimes also known as employee screening or post-hire screening, it’s perfectly natural to have some questions. Here we’ll look at some of the most common questions around rescreening, from what it is and why companies do it to creating a rescreening cadence and introducing rescreening to your organization.
Rescreening is the process of reverifying an employee’s background during their employment — usually no sooner than 12 months after they were hired. Like pre-employment screening, a rescreening program typically includes a number of different checks, which may vary depending on the employee’s role and the perceived risk associated with it.
Rescreening occurs most often in regulated sectors such as Financial Services, which is widely regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in Singapore. Screening is also often regulated in the healthcare industry, as it is important to verify that medical professionals’ licenses and qualifications are valid and up to date, as well as in the US transportation industry, where drivers’ records need to be regularly checked.
However, other non-regulated industries, such as technology, often also regard rescreening as best practice and adopt it widely throughout their businesses. Start-ups and technology companies are often working on new and sometimes highly confidential projects, and protection of their IP may be essential to the success of their businesses. For this reason, many of these companies are already rescreening their employees periodically post-hire.
Additionally, companies with representatives that work in home, with vulnerable people (e.g., children, the elderly, or those requiring in-home services), or in front-facing, highly visible roles may also choose to periodically rescreen these workers.
People change. It’s as simple as that. A pre-employment background screening can be used to help assess a candidate’s suitability for a job, but how can you be sure they are still suitable for the position without a rescreening program in place?
Rescreening is often used as a way to help companies mitigate their ongoing people risk after their employees’ initial background screenings. Businesses may also rescreen to:
Ultimately it’s up to each business to decide how to best mitigate the ongoing people risk of their workforce. The decisions about who to screen and rescreen, and how to do it, may be made in collaboration with many different areas of the business, including but not limited to:
As such, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to rescreening. Some businesses may only rescreen certain high-risk positions, such as those with access to customer data or financial records, or those with administrator systems access. However, other companies with a lower risk appetite may rescreen all of their employees annually to help minimize their risk as much as possible.
HireRight’s 15th Annual Benchmark Report found that most businesses globally, and especially those in EMEA and APAC, had some of their workforce working remotely 2021 and 2022. With many employees no longer working from the office full-time, and new hires often being onboarded remotely, it can be more difficult for employers to identify any changes in their workforce that could pose additional risks to their businesses. As such, organizations with remote or hybrid employees may find rescreening useful to help manage the risks of their remote workforce.
Regulated industries may dictate certain checks which need to be conducted for employees holding regulated positions, but in other sectors it’s often not so black and white.
Typically a non-regulated rescreening package will include checks of non-static data — meaning that the information a candidate provided (and was checked) pre-hire may have changed during their period of employment, and so is being rescreened. This could include checks such as criminal record checks, credit history, global sanctions and enforcement checks, and adverse media, depending on what is appropriate for the position being held by the employee.
As a rule of thumb, if it is included in your pre-employment screening package, it could generally be included in your rescreening package. Conversely, it is unusual to introduce checks in a “rescreening” which were not covered in the employee’s initial pre-employment screening, unless something is expected to have changed or the employee is being considered for a new role. Typically businesses do not rescreen components which are very unlikely to have changed since the employee was hired, such as their employment history or their academic qualifications.
You should speak with your background screening provider about the checks available that may suit your needs for rescreening your current workforce.
HireRight is the industry’s premier provider of employment screening services, helping educational institutions hire honest, qualified, and reliable employees.
