Effective contractor screening is imperative for maintaining your company’s culture and for limiting mishaps on the worksite. Without systematic screening measures in place, you’re leaving plenty of room for error or accidents because you don’t have a clear snapshot of your workers’ backgrounds.
Essentially, contractor screening is the preventive medicine that makes the doctor irrelevant or at least far less frequent. Avoid the mishaps and take care of this now, if you haven’t already.
There are a lot of contractor screening services out there. In this post, we’ve pulled together some best practices for determining that you’re moving forward with the best partner.
Basic Requirements That a Contractor Screening Service Needs to Check
If you’re working with an effective company, they’ll be sure to take care of these basic contractor screening factors when onboarding new hires. If they don’t cover one of these items, they may not be the best partner for your business.
- Criminal Background Check
- Drug Testing
- Education, Employment & Reference Verification
Now, most contractor screening services will advertise that they check all of these areas, but the real question is, are they checking them effectively? You can find out by researching their reputation and asking for references. Luckily, reputation management is critical in today’s digital world. Online reviews are easy to find and easy to verify.
Also look for the speed with which they perform screenings, as well as checking to see if they’ve ever had any contractors with significant red flags slip through the cracks. Do your due diligence in research before signing any contracts to save headaches in the future.
Ensure Industry Specific Contractor Screening
After you verify that your service is covering the necessary bases in a thorough and efficient method with plenty of verification to back them up, you should consider whether or not they are experts in your industry. Every worksite has its own unique needs, so all contractors should be able to meet your requirements.
Industry-specific contractor screening programs will go the extra mile to screen prospects for whether or not they have proper training. Also, these focused solutions may offer training tools so that untrained prospects that pass a background check (and provide a clean drug test) can graduate and become members of your team, which is always beneficial in this difficult labor market.
Benefits of the Right Contractor Screening Partner
Save Money: Overall, contractor screening will save you money. Your organization will avoid the high costs associated with accidents that occurred from a lack of training, theft, or some other unfortunate accident. There are also costs you need to consider that might not be glaringly obvious. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that for workers in construction, each nonfatal occupational injury or illness in 2015 resulted in 13 median days away from work.
Save Time: Proper screening will also save your organization time. Most importantly, the screening partner will manage all of the time-consuming information gathering processes. In a way, this is also a cost-saving — opportunity costs, but savings nonetheless. They will also help increase the speed of the process by helping vet and hire new contractors more efficiently so you can begin training and onboarding them quicker.
Leverage Expertise: When you work with a reliable contractor screening partner, you’ll be able to take advantage of their insight and knowledge of your industry. They can help you determine if the contractor is the right fit before they step on the worksite. They can also help protect you from liability due to improper background screening, which keeps your organization compliant and able to perform its work without interruption.
This is an incredibly important vendor partnership. Make sure that you consider the gravity of this decision. Perform plenty of research on the success rate of all your potential vendors and have real conversations with them before entering an agreement. Finally, prioritize a vendor that specializes in your industry.
If you have questions about the contractor screening process of finding a vendor, contact our team today by clicking here. Thank you for reading!
*This article is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to constitute legal advice.