THE NEED FOR
PERSONNEL VETTING
Personnel
vetting is used to refer to all such steps taken to ensure as much as
practicable that incoming employees of an organization are not criminally
minded. It includes imposing such surveillance, on a routine basis, on the
activities of its existing employees (Osasebor, 2005).
RECRUITMENT
PROCEDURE
Recruitment
is the official invitation of qualified applicants to apply for existing job
vacancies in an organization. It follows the process of advertising for
existing vacancies through to placement.
The
objective of recruitment procedures is to identify honest and competent
applicants. To achieve this, appropriate information must be collected about
the applicant and then verified. The method for collecting such information is
pre-employment screening, the most important aspect of which are the employment
application, interviews, verification, and testing. These procedures are thus
explained.
i.
The employment
application:
Interested members of the public are asked to apply in persons and not by
proxy.
ii.
Interviews: Attention
should be paid to reasons for leaving previous jobs, frequent changes of
residence, and job related medical history. Applicants should be questioned in
an appropriate way and warned that thorough background and reference checks
will be made. The applicant should be encouraged to ask questions and express
any reservations he or she may have; these may indicate potential future
problems.
iii.
Verification: If an applicant
has successfully completed all the previous stages, it is then time to verify
all the information.
iv.
Testing: Numerous tests
to assess basic intelligence, aptitude, attitude, and personality and to
predict delinquency behavior exist and should be used as an integral part of
pre-employment screening.
BACKGROUND
INVESTIGATION ON APPLICANTS
The
application of good internal control measures reduces losses due to fraud by
staff because the opportunities to commit fraud are blocked. It has been
observed in practice that risk to security from employees is more in any
organization than thieves or robbers from outside the organization. Before any
outside intruders come in they must invariably have an accomplice on the
inside. In spite of this, many employees do not check in the bona fides of a
prospective employee (Osasebor, 2005). However, a considerable degree of
internal control measure may further be imposed at little or no cost by a
thorough checking before employment on the background of all applicants. No
person should be employed if there is any perceived dint that his integrity is
questionable. This however, does not mean that a man of integrity will not
steal if he has the opportunity but that willingness to steal will be less from
employees of stable character.