Questions employers ask about
continuous workforce screening

Workforce criminal screening continuously compares an enrolled roster of employees, contractors, gig workers, volunteers, and others with new public court records. It can surface relevant criminal activity that occurred after an initial background check. It does not monitor employee communications, devices, behavior, or location; PostHire reports public-domain court information according to the criteria an employer configures.

Criminal screening involves identifying potential threats and recognizing behaviors and choices that could jeopardize your business and brand. Employers conduct criminal screening to safeguard their workplace, customers, assets, and reputation, basically the same reasons they conduct background checks. Think of it as a background check that never ends.

Yes. In nearly all jurisdictions, employers can legally perform ongoing checks of employees’ criminal activity as long as they obtain the individual’s consent, in the same way they did for the original background check. The data PostHire reports is 100% public domain.

Workforce screening uncovers convictions, arrests, pending cases, dismissed cases, and case progression. Those records come from over 4,000 county courts and all federal district courts in the United States, covering more than 98% of the US population, and are updated within minutes of filing.

Your workforce is compared against new criminal activity continuously rather than on a schedule. PostHire reads primary-source court records that are updated within minutes of filing, and when a relevant event appears the employer is notified with all published details; a global airline using PostHire receives its alerts within hours of a triggering event. Case updates follow the first notification so the situation can be handled as it develops.

Pre-hire background screening vets potential employment candidates in an effort to keep the “bad guys” out. This type of traditional one-and-done screening is, at best, a snapshot of impermissible activity and is almost immediately out of date. Pre-hire background checks do not uncover problematic incidents that occur after the candidate becomes an employee – they are all about the past. Employers have no visibility into potential criminal activity once the employee becomes part of the team, which is when they potentially may become a real threat to an organization.

A post-employment background check screens someone who already works for you, rather than a candidate you are considering hiring. A pre-hire check is a photograph of the past and starts aging the day it is taken; a post-employment check covers what has happened since. PostHire performs this continuously rather than on a schedule, comparing your roster against new criminal records from over 4,000 county courts and all federal district courts and alerting you when a relevant event is filed. Employers run it because the person cleared at hire is not necessarily the person on the roster today.

Many employers that rescreen employees do so on a regular schedule, such as annually or every 2-3 years from hire date. Because of these significant gaps, rescreens leave room for criminal activity to fall under the radar. Would you want to wait a year to find out someone was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon?

Most employers that rescreen do it annually, or every two to three years from the hire date. The interval is the problem: an arrest in month two of a three-year cycle stays invisible for nearly three years. Rescreening on a schedule takes the same point-in-time photograph, only less often. Continuous screening removes the interval, because the roster is compared against new court records as they are filed. Across the US, 200,000+ new criminal records are added daily.

PostHire reports public court information, not employee communications, devices, behavior, or location. Employers should clearly explain the purpose of screening, what information is reviewed, how it is used, and who can access it. Consent and a clear policy help employees understand the process.

Yes, employees have the right to dispute erroneous information with the organization. Employers should define and follow proper procedures for handling disputes and ensure that decisions are fair and based on accurate information.

To ensure that their monitoring practices comply with anti-discrimination laws, employers should apply consistent standards to all employees, avoid making decisions solely based on a criminal record, and consider rehabilitation and job-relatedness.

Employers should clearly communicate their criminal screening policies during the hiring process, with periodic updates as needed. It is a necessary step in ensuring transparency and trust between the organization and its employees.

Prior to now, organizations have relied solely on “employee self-reporting” of incidents, which doesn’t work. While the concept makes all the sense in the world, the technological capabilities to access court documents in near real-time did not exist before now. Unless your organization is using a post-hire screening tool that captures contemporaneous criminal data nationwide, you most certainly are not benefiting from active nationwide criminal monitoring.

Almost every organization conducts a background check, but once the check is completed, it is history and the individual you hire now represents a future risk to your organization. Additionally, most background checks are not national in scope. You may not hire a convicted felon, but if they are arrested for a felony after they are hired, don’t you want to know?

Self-reporting simply doesn’t work as there is little to no motivation for someone to put their job at risk. The suspects are released for most infractions within days, if not within hours. For example, in one instance we found an individual who was arrested for shooting someone on a Friday and was back at work the following Wednesday…

As you can see, serious crimes often do not result in long-term confinement, either at arrest or sentencing. Below are some examples of felonies that our clients were unaware of:

• Assault with a Deadly Weapon with Intent to Kill or Inflict Serious Injury
• Sexual Assault
• Child Endangerment
• Embezzlement
• Breaking and Entering
• Larceny
• Habitual Driving While Impaired
• Possession of Controlled Substance with Intent to Sell or Distribute

You don’t know what you don’t know. We have found that up to 4% of the workforce becomes involved in some type of illegal activity, some of which would have precluded them from becoming employees originally. Your ability to demonstrate to stakeholders that your organization has taken timely and fair proactive steps to meet safety and security obligations is one of the program’s ROI.

The return has three parts: what you find, what you avoid, and what you can demonstrate. In one 90-day comparison at a uniformed security company with 50,000 individuals on its roster, PostHire matched 957 incidents to workforce identities where the monitoring service already in place matched 251, with no false positives. The PostHire savings calculator estimates the saving against traditional screening at $8 per employee per year for a workforce of 10,000 to 49,999. That is an illustrative saving, not a PostHire price or a guaranteed result. The third part is harder to price: being able to show stakeholders that the organization took timely and proportionate steps to meet its safety obligations.

PostHire matches records to people with a proprietary identity-matching algorithm, and every notification carries the offense description, optionally with an electronic stamped copy of the government record, so you are reading the court document rather than a summary of it. In a 90-day comparison across 50,000 individuals at a uniformed security company, PostHire returned zero false positives. You also choose which of more than 100 categories of offense generate an alert, so the system reports the events your organization has decided it needs to act on.

Setup and maintenance are simple. All you have to do is provide us with a list of employees to be screened and identify what type of activity you want to be alerted on. That’s it. Alerts are sent to you in real-time as criminal activity occurs. Because our data is directly from the primary source, it will significantly reduce the amount of time required of your resources to verify and investigate the authenticity of convictions.

Not at all. We only supply data that is 100% in the public domain.