The Essential Guide to Hiring a Private Detective for Effective Private Investigations

Businesses in all industries should consider doing pre-employment private background checks. Through this investigation, you can verify the candidate’s credentials, find out whether they have a criminal history, and even learn things about their personality. A background check can help you determine if someone is truly a good fit for your team. 

Below, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about background checks from both the employer’s and employee’s perspectives. This includes the benefits of background checks, red flags to look out for, how long background checks take, and more.

The main purpose of a pre-employment background check is to verify information provided by the candidate and to look out for red flags. Someone conducting a thorough background check, like a private investigator, will look into a candidate’s criminal history, education, references, and previous employment history. 

An investigator can also check the candidate’s social media to ensure that the individual isn’t misrepresenting their personality or temperament during the interview phase. Finally, a PI may check someone’s credit score and history, particularly if the position they’ve applied for involves finances. 

Red flags on background checks include:

There are many advantages to conducting a pre-employment background investigation, from reduced employee turnover to lowering your business’s chances of being sued. Here’s why you should include background checks in your hiring process. 

Background checks yield better hires! The primary reason for this is that a background check can eliminate candidates who were dishonest about their credentials. With a background check, you can rest assured that you’re hiring people with the character and qualifications you’re looking for. 

As an employer, you have the power to create a safer workplace for your employees. An effective way of doing this is by conducting background checks. Background checks can dig up all kinds of information, including whether or not your candidate has a history of assault, harassment, stalking, or any other concerning behaviors. By eliminating these people from the hiring pool, you’re helping to keep your workplace safe for everyone. 

The safety of your employees should obviously be the top priority. However, there is an added bonus of protecting your business from lawsuits. If an incident occurs at work that the company could have prevented, there could be a basis for a lawsuit for negligent hiring. But if you take the time to check into a candidate’s criminal record before hiring them (and find nothing of note), you can honestly say that you didn’t know and aren’t responsible for an employee’s actions. 

If you hire people who are temperamental or simply not well-suited to the job, you increase the chances of them getting fired or quitting. This isn’t good for morale and can be costly in the long term. Thankfully, you can reduce your employee turnover considerably by weeding out bad or unpredictable hires with background checks. 

We’ve established that background checks are good for employers, but how about employees? If a company you’ve applied to wants to do a background check on you, there’s really no need to worry. Background checks aren’t a big deal, provided you don’t have anything in your history to be overly concerned about. 

Actually, background checks are a good thing for employees at the end of the day. They’re a sign that a business is seriously interested in hiring you. They also show that you’d be joining a team where everyone has been vetted. That means you’ll be hired into a safer and possibly more productive workplace. 

The amount of time needed to complete a background check varies depending on the information you’re verifying. Verifying someone’s academic credentials, for example, can take several days. Checking someone’s criminal history, however, can take as little as one or two days. The process may take longer depending on the state you live in and whether or not the candidate emigrated to the US.

If you want to have all of this information verified as quickly as possible, you should consider hiring a private investigator. A PI knows the process inside and out, so they can perform background checks that are both quick and thorough. 

Barefoot Professional Investigations has been conducting expert background checks for employers across North and South Carolina. For the last 35+ years, we’ve helped businesses hire the best talent and promoted workplace safety in the process. If you’re in need of other services, our private detective agency also offers computer forensics, corporate bug sweeps, child custody investigations, and more.

If you’re interested in our services or have any questions, we encourage you to get in touch with us. You can contact our team by calling 704-377-1000 (Charlotte, NC) or 803-973-8999 (Columbia, SC), emailing info@barefootpi.com, or completing our online form at your next convenience.

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