VOLUNTEER SCREENING

The minute you meet someone, you begin screening them.

You are evaluating everything about them. You begin trying to rely on your "gut" feeling and subconsciously begin to pick up clues about your candidate's "suitability".

For obvious reasons, you can not rely on your "gut instinct" when it comes to screening volunteers.

It is important to use a structured procedure instead of making haphazard, and potentially arbitrary, decisions. Your organization must have a fair and defensible screening method.

There is no longer a debate about whether or not your organization should screen volunteers.

The debate is now "how" you should screen your volunteers.

For most organizations, cost is a factor in deciding what type of screening to conduct. Unfortunately, many organizations make this "the" most important factor when conducting their criminal background checks. Instead of considering the quality of the screening, they focus solely on cost and often end up using an outdated internet database that has huge "gaps" or "holes" in it.

This can have tragic consequences.

For example, even the State of Texas' own Department of Public Safety criminal database is incomplete. A recent study showed that the Texas Department of Public Safety online instant criminal records database revealed no criminal records for many of the inmates currently on Texas’ Death Row.

Most other state databases have the same issues.

So, if you can't fully rely on a state's own criminal database, what's an organization to do?

As a private investigations company, we are able to access information that is not available to the typical screening company or available to the general public.

The most important thing to consider when conducting criminal background checks is the "freshness" or "accuracy" of the information contained in the report. One of the best ways to ensure that you are getting the most up to date criminal information is to conduct a direct county verification. The county's data is usually the most current and up to date.

Instead of dictating to you what type of screening you should conduct, we like to visit with you and find out what you want to accomplish with your volunteer screening and we must also consider your budget. Based on our conversation, we will make a recommendation to you with a few different options for your screening reports.

Our most common volunteer screening reports typically include a validation of the volunteer's name, social security number, date of birth, driver's license information, criminal background, and of course, sex offender status.

Our "packaged" or "bundled" products are very competitively priced and provide a much higher quality screening than relying on an outdated, online, criminal database search.