3 Reasons Why Rescreening is Important to Your Organization

So, someone told you to consider rescreening your current employees and volunteers—should you? To put it briefly, yes! Rescreening annually is a great way to not only continue protecting your organization and its mission, but it also enables you to better protect the employees and volunteers you call family. To help guide you through this process, we’ve put together a brief overview of what ‘rescreening’ could mean for your organization, the top three reasons you should rescreen, and some best practices to get started!

What is rescreening?

Rescreening is the process of screening a current employees and/or volunteers again after hire. Unlike pre-employment screening, the rescreening process is not as broad. Education history, previous employment, and identification are typically verified through the pre-employment screening process. Thus, a rescreening process tends to focus on criminal checks, credit reports, and other dynamic factors. 

Important note: Rescreening needs can (and often do) differ from organization to organization, so it’s important to determine which rescreening factors are necessary to your organization and work with your background screening vendor to execute rescreening for you. 

And yes, rescreening is legal! Like pre-employment background checks, there are some regulations and guidelines. To rescreen and order background reports throughout a person’s employment, it’s important to collect authorization by stating so clearly and conspicuously. 

For more legal considerations regarding background screening, visit the EEOC’s guidance document. 

Why should you rescreen employees annually?

There are three main reasons why you should rescreen your current employees and volunteers annually. Besides better ensuring the safety of your team members and clients, conducting annual rescreens helps you:

1. Maintain updated records
2. Verify initial or past background checks
3. Stay up-to-date on background screening requirements

1. Maintain updated records

As you know, there’s more to the lives of your employees and volunteers than your organization, and, unfortunately, once a clean record, not always a clean record. A lot can happen every year—just compare 2020 to 2019! Things change over time, so it’s best to keep updated records of team members of your organization by rescreening annually. We’re not saying to not trust your team. We’re saying to protect them. By updating your records on an annual basis, you’re doing your part to maintain a safe environment for your internal team and clients. 

2. Verify initial background checks

With so much going on in the realm of talent acquisition and management, some employees (and volunteers!) can manage to slip through the cracks with regards to screening. It happens! Individuals can unintentionally bypass an initial background check or, depending on your initial screening provider, a background check can be completed with inaccurate information. That’s why we suggest rescreening team members annually to ensure accurate and compliant employee records, especially if you switch background screening vendors. 

3. Stay up-to-date on screening requirements

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, the average job tenure is 4.2 years in the U.S. A lot can happen in a year, let alone 4.2 years! Today, background checks are way more comprehensive than they were just years ago. Why? Things change! Laws were passed—both state and federal. Thus, it’s best practice to rescreen and verify that individuals' credentials and records are not in conflict with your organization and/or legal requirements. One screen per hire or volunteer just simply isn’t enough. 

Tip: Whenever you update your background screening policies, rescreen current employees and volunteers to ensure they’re held to the same standard as new hires. 

Best practices on rescreening

We’ve mentioned just a few of the reasons why rescreening is important to your organization, but where do you start? It’s best practice to start by rescreening your current employees and/or volunteers annually, preferably around their anniversary date. This allows you to stay on top of compliant screening.

In addition to annual rescreens, consider rescreening:

• Current employees upon promotion or job responsibility changes.
• Current volunteers when their responsibility or position changes.
• Contractual workers every time they’re hired for a new project.
• Employees involved after a workplace incident.
• Your organization’s leadership team, including board members, annually.

Don’t let the time of developing a rescreening program discourage you from rescreening your employees and volunteers. Verified First can help you get started with rescreening, today!