Lifestyle analysis, ‘reading’ your candidates through their lifestyles

Pre-employment background screenings have been a critical part of the recruitment process. While background screenings help employers verify the information candidates provide on their resumes, it can also help employers understand and predict candidates’ behaviors.

Since it is related to risk minimization, behavior has become an important parameter in candidate assessment. According to the Report to the Nations 2022, the majority of fraud perpetrators display specific behaviors, the most notable of which is in their lifestyle: living beyond their means.

Lifestyle analysis

Therefore, companies also need to know candidates’ lifestyle information. This information becomes one of the many elements that need to be analyzed comprehensively.

The purpose of a lifestyle analysis is to find out the candidate’s consumption behavior and other information that may not be mentioned on their resume:

• To ensure that your candidate is not involved in any radical ideologies and/or political parties actively. Hiring candidates involved in political movements or parties can create situations where conflicts of interest can arise in the company. In addition, the company may be exposed to legal and reputational risks.
• To search information on the candidate’s behavior and reputation in their neighborhood, if somehow the candidate has ever been involved in criminal activity.
• To obtain information on candidates’ financial background. Candidates with discrepancies in financial flows have the potential propensity to embezzle their company’s assets.

Moreover, lifestyle analyses are especially important for candidates who will hold critical roles, such as company decision-makers or positions that are related to the company’s financial matters.

Information digging

In practice, candidate lifestyle information can be obtained through desktop searches, which is essentially searching for information via the internet, including social media screening. The existence of social media encourages people to build a habit of sharing activities and things that happen in their lives.

This includes how they interact with other users, and whether they have committed violations, such as making hate speech statements, racial slurs, vulgar words, or sharing explicit images. Other information includes where they spend their holidays, what vehicles they use, and how they spend their weekends. Such information can be obtained through social media.

However, a media search alone is not enough. Another method, namely a credit check, is required as a cross-check reference. This check is to assess the candidate’s trustworthiness and aptitude in managing money.

Credit card and loan activities such as mortgages and auto lease payments are included in a consumer’s credit history. Using this data, hiring managers can get insight into a candidate’s debt payment history, total debt, and debt use patterns.

Another method that can be used is field visits. This method is usually accompanied by address verification.

While verifying the candidate’s address, the field team collects information related to the candidate’s lifestyle by interviewing the subject’s neighbors. For example, the team may ask the neighbors about the subject’s reputation in the neighborhood and ask about the subject’s daily and weekend activities.

Collecting this kind of information is often not a simple job. Apart from taking time, it also requires certain skills gained from experience and professional training.

Integrity Asia has been trusted by our clients from various business backgrounds for more than two decades to conduct pre-employment background screening and provide comprehensive analytical reports via Prisma, an application that systematizes the management of the screening process and facilitates management to supervise the screening requests in real-time, streamlines processes to reduce the turnaround time, automatizes the report generation, and archives the reports.

By having all the facts at hand, your company will be better equipped to make the right hiring decisions. For more detailed information on employment background screening and other compliance services, contact us today.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Devi