Education Verification – an important tool for your company

Verifying a candidate’s education is always a good idea. It confirms the background of your potential employee, in addition to their training and knowledge.

Although such verifications can sometimes take extra time to complete, there are jobs at your company where it’s essential that education, professional certification or licensure has been completed and remains up to date.

Knowing what to discover during education verification can speed up the process and make it easier to process the information garnered from the verification check.

If your organization desires to hire qualified candidates, then verification of all educational, certified and licensure claims from the candidate should always be a part of the screening process.

Here’s a few notes to help you make sure your new employees have the qualifications required for the job, helping you to ensure a bright future for your team and business.

What is it?
Education verification is the process of verifying a candidate’s educational, certification and licensure-related claims. Education verification can be conducted for any level of education including high school, GED equivalency exams, colleges, universities and professional certifications or licenses.

These background checks include finding information on whether someone attended and graduated from the schools they claim and what grades they received.

Usually, education verification is referring to education earned from colleges and universities. In almost every situation, the school will require a written release from the candidate before releasing records and transcripts.

Services provided
As part of your background checks on potential candidates, you can have GroupOne Background Screening conduct education verification checks for you. Here at GroupOne, we will conduct the entire pre-employment screening for you all at once.

Legal issues
When verifying a candidate’s past education, you will need them to provide their name, date of birth and Social Security Number. It is always important to provide the candidate with what the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires of businesses.

The FCRA requires employers to inform the candidate they are running the background check and to receive written consent prior to doing so. If you do not hire the candidate and the reason for not doing so is related to what is received during the background check process, the employer is required to share the results with the candidate. This will allow them to see if there is a mistake in the reporting.

As we’ve discovered at GroupOne, such mistakes are not a rarity and the FCRA has an adverse action process that must be followed. The FCRA also requires by law that if employers do utilize a third party for this service such as GroupOne, employers need to inform candidates in writing of all FCRA-related rights.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) also requires that there is no discrimination during the review process. Employers should be consistent in how background checks are conducted. All of your potential employees should receive the same type of review utilizing identical processes and methods.

As usual, it is also important to be cognizant of local laws based on the location of your company and the candidate.

Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have questions.