Peter Cleverton looks at the increasing popularity of the practice on the continent.
When there’s a war on talent, you want to make sure you get the right talent through the door.
Many businesses in Europe are still unfamiliar with employee background screening. With HR professionals and hiring managers alike possibly never having been through the screening process themselves, it’s no surprise there may be a few knowledge gaps about this discipline.
The UK has long been the central hub of background screening within Europe and the broader EMEA region, with awareness of screening and the uptake of it at the highest levels within the region.
If we look at where organizations are screening the greatest volumes of candidates, it is usually where they have large outsourcing centres in Europe, such as in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Ireland. In addition, we have been seeing that in the Benelux region (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg), as well as in France and Germany, many companies have been starting to look at their screening programmes more holistically.
However, there are some countries in the region where businesses may find background screening a little more difficult to introduce. This could be due to a number of factors such as works councils or complex local compliance impacting which checks are permissible. Additionally, in certain countries, background screening is something that is still slightly frowned upon, and it can be a challenge to get large European organisations to look at screening as a wholesale activity.
Many businesses in the UK understand this approach, and certain other countries are buying into it, but we don’t yet broadly see a top-to-tail ‘let’s screen everybody who comes onboard’ attitude to background screening in the region.
In Europe, financial services and technology companies have long been leading the way when it comes to the adoption of pre-employment screening. However, in the last 18-months to two years, we’ve been seeing more life sciences and pharmaceuticals companies aligning their screening programmes internally, looking at a global landscape rather than being more country-specific.
Start-ups – particularly those in fintech, new technology businesses, and ‘unicorns’ (privately held businesses valued at over $1bn) – are also experiencing the benefits of screening and adopting it as a part of their onboarding strategies to help safeguard their businesses for the future.
Over the last five to ten years, the profile of background screening in Europe has risen significantly. Where there’s a war on talent, you want to make sure you get the right talent through the door.
Awareness and acceptance of background screening vary widely from country to country and industry to industry, which can make it difficult to quickly implement a regionwide screening policy. From a legal perspective, there is also a lot to consider when screening in different countries, as each territory will have its own laws, which may impact the types of checks that can be conducted as part of the screening process or the scope of those checks.
Additionally, internal alignment within the organisation can be a stumbling block to rolling out global screening programmes. Typically, it is the security, fraud, and risk teams or the HR departments that want to roll out screening globally and who want to have a uniform approach. However, if this is attempted without getting the buy-in from the different regional stakeholders, this process can be very time-consuming, for both the screening provider and the business.
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SVP and MD of EMEA at HireRight
Peter Cleverton is responsible for managing all aspects of the day-to-day running of the business in EMEA.
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