Pre Employment Screening recipes
Seven Danger Areas To Watch For In A Hi-Tech World
With new technologies being introduced into your business environment at a dazzling pace, it’s easy to overlook the extent to which the divide between your employees’ work time and their private lives and ambitions is increasingly blurred. Some corporate managers wonder whether they can any longer define where it is. One American CEO recently observed that it’s more like a seismic fault line that’s expanded into an ever-widening corridor.
Here are a number of areas where you need to be aware of what your employees are doing. If you’re not sure how to monitor their activities, call in a team of experienced professionals who are sensitive to the privacy and legal issues sometimes involved. Using sophisticated equipment and new techniques like computer forensics, they will analyse all of your electronic traffic, access to your databases, incoming and outgoing mobile and text communications, business transactions and other relevant dimensions of your corporate operations in order to provide you with a map of what’s really going on. Once that’s established, they can also help you grapple with what needs to be done.
1. The Mobile Employee.
The widespread use of 3G wireless broadband means that much of what used to be done in your office can now be carried out almost anywhere. Smartphones, for example, have all but replaced the need for an office with a fixed line. While BlackBerry has contributed greatly to satisfying our addiction to mobile email, the market for staying connected while you’re out and about has expanded enormously. In a similar way, notebooks are increasingly coming with built-in 3G wireless for internet access on the road. If you have a fair percentage of your staff constantly outside your office you need to know whether you’re getting value for money from them, be it in customer relations terms or through recruiting new clients. Do you have any idea where they are when they’re outside your office? There are ways of checking.
Bribery and Corruption: Keeping Your Business Within the Law
If you’re doing business with China, here’s something worth reading. It applies to many other countries as well and highlights why it pays to have on call a professional team of investigators that can warn you when your company is shaving close to the wind. Things like computer forensics, transactional analysis and forensic accounting could save you from the sort of embarrassment you don’t want to think about. Many in the international business world follow the travails of Stern Hu, the Australian citizen representing the iron ore interests in China of giant Anglo-Australian mining house, Rio Tinto, who was arrested in July for stealing “state secrets”. Now China is engaging in introspection on how its own business practices stack up.
What brought this on in China was a recent court case in California in which a US-based firm, Control Components (CCI), pleaded guilty to bribing officials in six huge Chinese state-owned enterprises, including China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and PetroChina. They don’t come much bigger than that. The bribes, which added up to nearly $US50 million, occurred over a ten-year period and also involved a number of other companies outside China. Control Components was fined just over $US18 million earlier in August for having violated the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and six of its executives still face charges of their own.
Not unexpectedly, the Chinese companies claimed that after exhaustive investigations of their own, no such cases of bribery had been uncovered.
Computer Forensics: Navigating for Survival and Success.
It is hard to imagine anyone in business these days who hasn’t heard of cyber hacking, anonymous emails, encrypted files, unauthorised access or cyber bullying. The list is endless. But what many haven’t heard of is diagrammatic and timeline rebuilding, complex transactional analysis, forensic investigation, visual mapping of data, plus call and cell tower analysis. Yet, they’re precisely the sorts of things that can save you from a business demise everyone dreads.
Know Where You Sit in a Fast-Moving Technological World: Lesson ONE.
An American commentator last year lamented that, ‘the information-dense, hyperlink-rich, spastically churning Internet is in effect rewiring our brains, making it harder for us to engage in deep, relaxed contemplation.’ True, but the danger isn’t so much that we no longer have time for philosophical rumination or to smell the roses. Rather, it’s that in this era of ‘wall-to-wall connectivity’ we place too much faith in our own technological literacy. Because we drive our laptops and BlackBerrys to the limit, we grow complacent and believe that attacks will only come from angles we’re already acquainted with – and think we’ve addressed. We lose interest in learning about associated dangers we don’t know we don’t know about.
Corporate Snooping the German Way: Lessons for All
Deutsche Bank is currently engaged in a complex and multi-layered investigation into the actions of some of its officers, even within its own corporate security department, to check whether crimes have been committed. The affair threatens to damage the bank’s standing, especially in Germany where anything vaguely smelling of corporate spying is frowned upon. A report on the case in The Financial Times on July 21 had the hallmarks of a best-selling novel, including a femme fatale. It’s the sort of nightmare that CEOs dread. Lesson one: if you engage in activity that might destroy your company’s reputation make sure you hire professionals with the forensic skill to do the job like a surgeon and not leave body parts on the floor.
Lesson two: preferably hire them from outside your firm. That way they’re not caught up in your internal promotional stakes and are more likely to be brutally frank with you when your own people can’t be. And hire them right from the start – not after the situation has evolved.
This is the latest in a series of so-called spy scandals at major German enterprises in recent times, which makes Deutsche’s problems flavour of the month. It’s everything the bank doesn’t want, especially while grappling with the impact of the global financial crisis. It is, after all, the country’s largest bank. The contracts of two employees have already been terminated, including that of its head of investor relations, as Deutsche continues its inquiry into possible unauthorised surveillance of board members and investors.
Pre employment screening: an anti-fraud tool
Fraud has become one of the greatest threats to corporations and organisations over the past decade. Forensic fraud investigators are often deployed to uncover fraudulent activity after suspicions are raised or a tip-off. Though estimates for the totals amount defrauded from corporations, institutions and governments vary wildly, they all agree on one point; the frequency and quantity of loss to fraud is increasing. One of the best estimates is conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) which calculates that U.S. organisations lose an estimated 7 percent of annual revenues to fraud - a staggering estimate of around US$994 billion for U.S. organisations in 2008.
Various surveys conducted by international accounting firms over the past 5 years have found that one of the best ways to combat fraud is to hire the most honest, qualified and experienced personnel available. This reduces the chances of hiring current or potential fraudsters and sets a minimum level of quality and ability for personnel hired. Intellisec believes the most effective way to do this is to perform pre-employment screening on all prospective hires, contractors and interns prior to engaging them.
What is PES?
PES is the abbreviation commonly used for `Pre Employment Screening’. PES generally refers to the method whereby a prospective employer arranges for information relating to a potential candidate or contractor to be checked and verified to confirm suitability for employment and whether they have a criminal record / history of being involved in dishonest activities.
