When hiring a care provider, nurse, or other home service provider, we often focus on professional qualifications and little else. We assume if a company has sent someone, they must be trustworthy. However, without proper vetting, we could be welcoming dangerous criminals into our homes.
Throughout history, there have been examples of people paying criminals to enter their homes. In the 1780s, a man named William Brodie was a locksmith who would use the keys he made to steal from his clients. To the public, he was an upstanding citizen, but his double life gripped the city of Edinburgh enough to inspire Robert Louis Stevenson to write Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you lived in Kansas between 1974 and 1988, a man named Dennis Rader could have installed your home security system. Rader worked for ADT but would become infamous as the serial killer BTK. Last year, a home healthcare provider was sentenced to 45 months in prison for stealing more than $1 million from two elderly clients.
We need to invite service providers into our homes for all kinds of things, but how can companies who dispatch them hedge the odds of incidents — and shield themselves from litigation?
Trust & Safety Obligation
In the past, a company would not necessarily be able to get the most up-to-date snapshot of an employee’s criminal record. If the report they pulled was clean when they were onboarded, there would be little reason to double-check. The problem and solution for organizations today are one and the same: technology makes it possible for businesses to have a real idea of who they hire. The reason this is good is obvious; a business can make hiring decisions informed by meaningful pre-hire criminal background checks. This is a problem because if something goes wrong, post-hire, with one of these people granted unfettered access to a client’s home, that business could face serious legal ramifications let alone brand reputation
Most companies have a standard process for performing background checks but there is much to be desired. Last year, it came to light that the Veterans Health Administration, the largest integrated healthcare system in America, had a breakdown in its background checks. This breakdown allowed nearly 2,000 people with felony drug convictions to be hired by the VA.
Consumers will not accept “we didn’t know better” or believe that the best practices were out of reach. Companies have a duty of care that they can ignore at the risk of serious litigation and potential harm to their clients. The good news is that the solution is simple, quick, and easy to access.
Continuous Verification Protects Your Castle
As criminals grow more creative, we must employ solutions equal to the threat. Let’s take responsibility as consumers and business leaders, demanding perpetual checks on those we welcome into our homes. The dangers within can only be eliminated through constant verification of identity and background. The time to act is now before that nightmare scenario ends up on the evening news again.
To truly secure our homes, we need assurance that everyone entering has passed stringent identity verification and screening that continues indefinitely after hiring. The solution must provide fully verified identity and background screening that updates perpetually.
If a nurse cleared today is convicted of assault next month, the continuous nature of this tool would instantly notify their employer and care recipient. This is a tremendous leap forward from the set-it-and-forget-it approach to traditional pre-employment checks that assume that because one has not committed a crime in the past, they never will.
Trua has developed a one-stop shop for companies that demand the highest standards. With our never-expiring TruaScore, individuals can understand and confirm what comes up in their background checks before they share the results with the companies they want to work for. TruaScore allows companies to streamline their onboarding processes while getting high assurance that their background check never expires for continued employment to service their customers
For employers TruaScore reduces liability, compliance costs, and — more importantly — protects customers. For families, it enables that peace of mind that comes from knowing your child’s tutor, repair person, or grandma’s new night nurse is who they say they are.
Is it Too Late for People I Hired Years Ago?
Just as a homeowner would like to keep criminals from ever entering their houses, business owners would like to keep people with spotty records from representing their companies. But what do you do for potential threats among your current staff?
Trua-CE is a turnkey solution for companies that need continuous screening. Trua-CE is the promise that if one of your employees is arrested or convicted of a crime, you will not have to wait to hear about it in your local newspaper.
Together, Trua-CE offers ironclad assurance that only the right people retain your trust and get into your business and your clients’ homes.
The future is uncertain, but the past is written in black and white on public court records across the country. If you need a security system installed, provide elder or child care, and your sink fixed, you should not have to cross your fingers and hope that the person you let in the door isn’t a felon.