Are you the hiring Manager? Do you do employment screening before you hire someone? Not all companies have the resources and talent to do these types of screening. For the safety of your company and the employee prospective employee background checks are important. Use these tips to hone your skills in doing background checking.

Make sure you employee application obtains plenty of information to start your background check. Missing information that helps you learn more about the applicant will make your checking more difficult. Look over your application form and create one that will help you in your background check.

Your first check is to look into the persons Social Security information. This is the starting point for your employment screening check. This check is done to make sure the Social Security belongs to the individual. It also gives you information on his past addresses and alias identity. Many people hide their own status by using other people's Social Security.

After you have the information from the Social, you can start the employment criminal background check. You can also start checking the individual's driving record. These two searches will give a better idea of the prospective historical data.

Once you have completed a variety of different information, you can match it up with the information you have on the application form. If there is a difference, then ask the applicant to explain this difference. It can be that there is a logical explanation and there was no intention to hide historical information.

Now, you can do a credit check as part of the employment screening. The credit report you get will be for employment decisions and this report will be different from a financial institution looking for credit worthiness. You cannot use a standard credit report for making employment decision.

To do an employment criminal background check you will need the applicant's birth date. The law does not permit you to ask for a birth date on the initial employment application. What you have to do is to hire the person and make his employment status based on passing the criminal check.

One thing most screeners miss is getting past co-workers names and phone numbers. Usually they will get supervisor's names but also fail to get their phone numbers. So get these names and phone numbers so that you can call and get more information on the prospective individual than would be provided by Human Resources.

Just with the information you get on the application, you can start you employment screening background check. This is why it's so important to have a good application form. If you use a standard application form, have it checked by an expert human resource person. Start with Social Security Check and end with a Criminal Records check.