Pre-employment screening/checks

Visas, Permits, Passports and Naturalization
1
Good morning Forum members,

Does UBS, Credit Suisse, Julier Baer perform pre-employment screening in IT roles?

Whats involved, eg Criminal background check, Reference check, Certification check, Credit check?

How far back do they go? Especially, if I have lived in more than 8 countries in the past 12 years...I can only imagine it will be very time consuming and costly.

Thanking you in advance for your input/experience.

Thank you.

Chau chau

2
I can only comment on the big bank I work for ..

Local criminal record check and local credit check only.

Then we must renew the credit check each year at the company expense.

3
Yes. They use specialist companies to do, so it is not that expensive to do. Last one I saw (about 18 months ago) covered three European countries and included

- Criminal records

- Public Records

- Social media

- Press clippings

- Education confirmation

- Reference confirmation

Public records showed the guy had changed his name a few times by deed poll and managers were uncomfortable with it.

4
It really depends on the level of exposure you'll have to "confidential" data. For banks is usually an extract of local debt register and criminal record. Then they pass the data to another company that will look you up on different databases.

I used to work for a company that manage the IT infrastructure of nuclear power plants. Screening for those is extremely thorough, they check the past 5 years of your life and sometimes even require a personal interview.

5
And I spent 30 years working for the Swiss main banks and everyone I was involved in recruiting both contractors and permanent were checking by HR and we got copies of the reports to review.

6
For a contacting role in Zurich a third party contacted me for the background/vetting procedure. I was asked to provide them with an address overview of the last 5 years.

Based on the information I provided them I was asked to sign documents to request debt- and criminal records in Switzerland and criminal records in the EU countries I lived the past 5 years. Since I also lived in multiple APAC countries they stated in their final report that they were not able to gain background information (criminal/debt) during that period of time.

No diplomas and previous work references were checked due to the fact that it was a contracting role. From my understanding a permanent role will include this, but not sure if the timeframe goes back with a maximum of 5 years.

7
thanks all for your wondering insights and sharing.

8
*wonderful