To create a healthy workplace, employers should build trust and transparency with their workers from the very beginning, during recruitment. Employment verification provides employers with the necessary insight into many important details that they should know about applicants before offering them a job. As a result, they can confirm that the information provided by applicants is true, determine if they have sufficient work experience, the necessary skills and confirm if titles, certificates, or licenses are valid. At the same time, keeping information gathered in the process of making pre-employment checks safe and protected concerns employees, employers and lenders. Therefore, it is critical to ensure employment verification security and keep data secure against any loss and theft.
Why Employment Verification Security Matters?
Employment verification includes disclosing personal information such as applicants’ salary, home address and work history. As it revolves around sensitive information, it is a constant target for phishing attacks.
Consequently, employees are most directly impacted as the information collected during employment verification could be used to steal their identity thus causing irreparable damage. In addition to this, clearing up malicious activity can take a lot of time and possibly delay important activities applicants are applying for.
On the other hand, not ensuring employment verification security can hurt companies in different ways. This kind of event can open them up to a lawsuit, resulting in significant legal costs. Losing applicants’ information during verification can also hurt a company’s reputation, but also damage the trust other employees have in a company.
Possible Employment Verification Security Flaws
Employment verification is usually necessary to apply for a loan, change a job, ask for government assistance or as part of the tenant screening process. Therefore, most employees rarely need employment verification, but when they do, it is part of a significant and urgent process.
Given that it is vital for employees that the screening process is done quickly and securely, employers should take the necessary precautions and prevent employment verification security flaws that leave their organizations and employees at risk for fraud.
Failing to Investigate the Requesting Parties
Employment verification requests are usually managed by a verification company or the company needing the verification directly, such as a bank, mortgage or rental company, or government agency. Verification companies handle requests or oversee the exchange of information. Without a verification company, employers have to handle all verification requests directly and this typically requires faxing or emailing back employee data when prompted by the other party.
One of the common employment verification security mistakes is to send the employee’s information back without investigating the requesting party first. As a result, the information sent could be used to steal the person’s identity and leave the company vulnerable to litigation as requests could be coming from someone phishing for sensitive information to commit fraud.
Not Checking the Source of Employment Verification Requests
One of the practices that can damage employment verification security is not confirming that employees truly need verification. To prevent this, employers should check the details and validity of the request with their employees before taking any further steps.
In addition to this, employers should make sure to stay compliant with relevant state laws requiring the proper destruction of certain personal information unless needed for a specific purpose.
Not Ensuring Data Security
Employee information is always at risk of a breach, no matter what kind of process takes place. As employers have a lot of sensitive data to handle, data security should be their main priority. Otherwise, they can expose their organizations and employees to a breach and enhance phishing attempts from parties making false employment verification requests.
Increasing Employment Verification Security
Many companies, especially larger ones, choose to outsource their employment verification, thus overcoming this time-consuming task, providing consistent information quickly and automating the completion of verifications. At the same time, this may cause privacy and compliance concerns as organizations handling sensitive data are obvious targets, due to the number of records they are working with. Taking this into consideration, companies should choose those providers who ensure employment verification security, accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Some of the principles potential employment verification providers should meet are:
- Exceptional service with knowledgeable staff to support your employees should any questions arise;
- Protection of company and potential employees’ information against unauthorized access with multi-factor authentication, sufficient firewalls and intrusion detection;
- A consistently accessible system with continuous performance monitoring;
- Complete, accurate, timely, and authorized information processing;
- Confidentiality of a company or potential employees’ information through encryption, access controls and permissions, firewalls, information policies and procedures; and
- Appropriate collection, use, retention, disclosure and destruction of personal information.
The majority of employees need employment verification for some major life event at some point and employers hold legal and ethical responsibility to protect their sensitive information. With the right employment verification solution, they can turn this into a simple and automated process and ensure the highest level of employment verification security.