The Diogenesian Pursuit of Honest Employees
Trying to find honest employees can make you feel like Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who walked the streets of Athens looking for an honest man. To help out in his quest, Diogenes carried a lantern with him during the light of day, but purportedly never had much luck. Fortunately, rather than using lanterns, retailers now have more advanced technology tools that can help out with the employee screening process.
An identity resolution solution is particularly well-suited for the Diogenesian pursuit of honest employees because it helps identify the obviously dishonest.
Identity resolution solutions aggregate information from a variety of data stores to form a clear, composite depiction of the identity of an individual. For employment pre-screening, this solution glides across multiple data sources (e.g., lists of known shoplifters, bad check writers, vendors, returns, perpetrators of organized retail crime, and LERPnet), applies sophisticated similarity search techniques to resolve multiple identities, and presents a single view of an individual that highlights otherwise hidden relationships based on the similarity of multiple attributes. For employee monitoring, the same process can check periodically to detect employees who may have been added to these sources of information after being hired.
In other words, it’s easier to shine a light on the honest employees, once you’ve tapped into your own in-house databases and ferreted out the dishonest ones.
How bad is employee theft?
Best keep the light on in that lantern because here’s some stats that will scare you:
“A national survey released in June found that one-quarter of job applicants lied or gave erroneous information. Avert Inc.’s survey, based on 1.8 million workers, also found that background checks led employers to disqualify about 13 percent of screened job applicants.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“In a sample study of 300,000 background checks conducted by U.S.A. Fact, the company found: 5% of applicants had criminal records; 36% had motor vehicle violations; prior employment was unverifiable for 18%; and education could not be verified for 11%.” — Strategic HR Services
“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.” — Lacrosse Tribune
“According to the U.S. Department of Justice, insider theft is growing at a rate of 15 percent annually. A Department of Commerce study revealed that one-third of all employees steal from their employers.” — Information Management Journal
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