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“Dumping” and “flushing” still practiced in employment screening industry


How do you know if your employment screening firm has actually completed the background screens you paid them for, or if they simply dumped them at 5 p.m., declaring that every applicant has a clear record?As recently as last week, the government once again discovered a background checking firm guilty of dumping. USIS, the go-to firm for government contractors and employees, was proven guilty of flushing with email subject lines like, “Flushed everything like a dead goldfish.”  Another email reads: “Scalping tickets for ‘Dick Clark’s Dumpin’ New Year’s Eve!’ … Who needs 2?” (NBC News Investigations).

As an HR professional, you already know that most background screens come back clean—only 1 out of 10 employees have a criminal record that will show results. However, this 10 percent is all that is needed to create litigation nightmares at best, and destroy your company from the inside at worst. Snowden single-handedly leaked government secrets to the world, endangering military personnel overseas and our security at home. Despite initial reserves by his employer over his history, he was hired anyway.

Is this just a USIS problem?  Unfortunately it is not.   Over the years we have run into too many competitors who actually have this “dumping”, “tugging” or “flushing” procedure in their daily process.  Over a decade ago, a new employee who had previously worked for a competitor came and asked me, “At what time of the day do we begin tugging the rest of the orders that are not complete? My old boss had us tug everything over one day old that was not complete at 4:45.  That keeps the turnaround time at 24 hours.  How do y’all do it?”   After I picked my jaw up off the ground I explained the consequences that would befall any KRESS employee caught falsifying information like that and attempted to retrain this misguided person.  Sadly, it was not the only time we had encountered this, but it was the last time.

So, how do we keep “dumping”, “tugging” and “flushing” out of KRESS’s practices?  One of the ways is that we no longer hire employees from other screening companies—ever.  In many industries, hiring employees with experience is a good thing, but not in our industry because it’s near impossible to retrain an employee who was taught to do that.

Honesty and integrity is not just a tag line; it’s a core value that must exist in every KRESS employee.  We use behavioral screening when hiring, profile testing, advanced technology to monitor every workstation, provide total transparency throughout the verifications process, and employ rigid policies and procedures to ensure every KRESS employee upholds the KRESS standards.  Our way is more work, plain and simple. But honesty and integrity is worth the work.  It’s the KRESS difference.

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