Employee Screening: An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Lobsters
Employees with initiative and creativity are great for your business, but would you hire this guy?
“An accused lobster thief was trapped by police yesterday after they said he tried to leave a Rte. 9 grocery store with more than $50 worth of lobsters - disguised as a bag of mussels.” See Lobster theft suspect pinched.
Here’s someone else you’d hate to have on your payroll. Did you hear about the jewelry store in San Diego that raised $12,000 for a cancer-stricken employee? This employee was later arrested for stealing $45,000 in merchandise, including one ring valued at $30,000. Her employers also suspected that she didn’t really have cancer.
This costly (and embarrassing) incident might have been prevented, if the jewelry store had had access to the right technology and the right data before hiring this employee. By linking the hiring process to the latest identity resolution software that can aggregate information from multiple internal and external data sources, the store could have learned about the previous incident and avoided a great deal of unneeded publicity and expense.
With an identity resolution system in place, the jewelry store would have discovered that this employee had been sued by another employer for stealing $55,000 from a high school cheerleading program. It’s pretty much impossible to tell if a potential employee is a good or bad person by simply looking at their resume. However, identity resolution software aggregates information from existing data stores, turning up lawsuits, convictions, bad debt, driving histories and the like to form a clear, comprehensive, composite depiction of your employees.
According to an annual survey conducted by the University of Florida, the average retailer loses an estimated 1.5% to 2.0% of their revenue each year due to customer, vendor, and employee fraud with 2006 total losses tagged at $41.6 billion. Employees actually steal more than shoplifters and moreover most are never caught:
“According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, 75 percent of all employee thefts went unnoticed. The average amount taken in retail was estimated at $1,750 per incident, and $3,400 per incident in all other business.” (For more, click here.)
It’s obviously easier not to hire high risk employees than to catch them in the act.
If you’re still relying on old technology to screen employees, here’s a few people you might want to warn HR about:
Lord of the (Shoplifting) Rings
“A man has pleaded guilty to charges in a three-state shoplifting ring that prosecutors say led to Internet sales of more than $400,000 in stolen merchandise.Blue light bust-up at Kmart
“He punched one employee, tackled another, and struck another. He kept assaulting and threatening them until police arrived; then he struggled with police. [..] They found that he had outstanding warrants for two charges of third-degree theft of property and one charge of second-degree theft of property.”Man Caught Switching Bar Codes, Three Days in a Row
“The next day, December 16, Ryan said investigators learned that Haneborg switched a price sticker on a Porter-Cable cordless hammer drill in the same manner. Ryan said Haneborg allegedly removed a Makita circular saw out of its box and put it in the box of a cheaper model then checked out.”Police catch ‘beer bandit’
“The Wal-Mart beer bandit apparently went back for refills, only to be grabbed by several store employees.”
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