How to Verify Education and Employment – Employer Solutions Plus

It has become a common employment practice to conduct background checks on potential employees. Some background checks are more extensive than others but at the most basic level, verifying education and employment are critical to ensuring you are getting what you are about to be paying for.

We wanted to share with you the process for completing these checks:

Education Verification:

Verifying an individual’s educational background may seem simple and straightforward – right? The truth is it consists of far more than just being able to pick up the phone and call their alma mater. The first step is to ensure that you obtain written consent to pursue this information from the employee. Once you have that, you will likely need to provide this to the educational institution who will likely only verify if they attended, not that they graduated, their GPA or provide a transcript. The schools are generally prohibitive from allowing individuals access to additional records or files and often charge fees for obtaining what information they are willing to provide. This can take as little as 3-5 days or weeks, depending on what you require and the policies.

Employment Verification:

Could you pick up the phone and call the references? Certainly. However if you are calling on behalf of the company as a third party vendor you are likely to get more honest and accurate information than if you call saying “I’m <Joe/Jane>’s new boss, I’d like to verify their history and references. Having a third party presents a level of trust and anonymity that is not present when you just pick up the phone yourself. It can take a significant level of effort to get people on the phone these days, taking away from valuable (and profitable) time you could be spending elsewhere.

Both processes are fairly tedious, require effort, follow up and also financial investments. And then what happens if the facts don’t check out? You have wasted all of those efforts. A simple way to circumnavigate this tedious process is to outsource it to a third party.

Employer Solutions Plus is an experienced HR solutions provider and we can help you choose the perfect partner for outsourcing employment, education and additional background verification in an efficient, effective and affordable manner. Consider us your HR “easy” button!