I work for a company that works with the elderly population.  The majority of our staff has some kind of interaction with them, whether it's visiting their home or supervising them for 8 hours at one of our facilities.  We do pre-employment background checks, but are also considering instituting recurring background checks for our employees with a lot of access to our elderly clients.  The purpose of this is to ensure the safety of our clients.    

Does anyone currently do recurring background checks on employees? If so, would you be willing to share how you do it - for example, is it best to do checks on all employees once a year or should we randomly check a certain percentage of employees several times a year, etc. Or maybe we should re-evaluate doing this at all. I would love your input.

If we do decide to do this, we also need to figure out what we will do with the information we find - if someone has been convicted of a crime - what will we do?

Thanks in advance!

HRBaby-

 My company currently performs this function annually.  We simply correlate this check with our annual merit program.  Prior to the issuance of merit increases and performance appraisals, we conduct a check on all employees.  Granted, the check conducted is only for our county since it is much cheaper than a national search, but it does provide insight as to what our employees are up to if it is bad.  Keep in mind that this is supported by a policy in place stating that we reserve the right to review criminal records at any time during employment and if something shows up, we reserve the right to follow the discipline policy up to and including termination.  We do leave the option open as far as the extent of punishment due to the varying reasons why someone can get into trouble these days.  So far, only one individual has been "caught" and I have received no push back from any employee/higher power.

I work for a non-profit organization and we have clients that are elderly and also clients that are brain injured. All new hires in any of our programs are checked through the Colorado Bureau of Investigation website, then fingerprinted. Once we submit the fingerprints to the CBI for a more thorough check, they notify us if any arrests are on record (whether or not the arrests have shown on the website) and they will also notify us of any future arrests.

Our elder care program is federally and state regulated and stipulates that NO ONE with ANY criminal history may be employed in the program, direct care or not. Although we trust the fingerprints, we have also implemented re-checking the CBI website annually (in January, just to make it easy.) The regulations make it pretty easy to decide what to do with someone who ends up with a criminal record. In our other programs, we would take their work history (quality and length of employment) and nature of the offense into consideration if we were notified of any future arrest.

Katrinal -

Thank you for responding!  It's nice to hear from another non-profit org and the HR rep.  It sounds like our companies are in the same line of business.  If you don't mind sharing, I would be interested in seeing that particular policy and/or procedure.  Right now, I'm gathering my research and hopefully we can implement and roll this out in the next couple of months.  My email address is mnorindr@neighborly.org.