Many companies now protect their reputation fiercely by ensuring all employees are screened thoroughly prior to being employed and often during the course of employment, but how many of these companies HR departments are involved in the employment of contract employees?
Many organisations today outsource facilities, e.g. security, cleaning, IT, marketing and so the list continues and the people are often placed on site and portray the image of a permanent employee. The negotiations with the supplying company are generally done by the procurement department and sometimes in conjunction with the facilities department but seldom in conjunction with the HR department.
When using a contractor network, the focus has to be that they are effective and competent, but you need to ensure that they do not bring operational, legal, or reputational risk to your organization. This is why the HR department must be engaged to ensure that the background checks done on the contract employees are in line with the company’s employee screening policy. Cost often becomes the major argument between the various parties, but any supplier worth their salt will be screening their own employees and should be happy to align their policy with that of their client.
It is for this reason that iFacts strongly recommends that the procurement department makes provision for such screening in their requests for proposals/tenders as well as in the contract signed for the services to be supplied. Ultimately the supplier could screen through the same service provider as the company but if that is not negotiable then the supplier should be obliged to provide the company with the details of the background checks that have been conducted and be happy for them to be verified. A simple way of ensuring this happens is to engage with the risk department and ensure access is not provided to any person without proof of a clear background check. This can be extended to align with ongoing screening programmes and access can be re-issued on a regular basis.
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