Improving the quality of your police check inputs – particularly surrounding the role and industry the candidate is filling – helps to protect the community by ensuring that WorkPro, our clients, ACIC and employers are all working with verified and meaningful information, and therefore able to make informed business decisions.

Inadequate information can result in police checks being marked as Unable to Process by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC).

Alternatively, the WorkPro Customer Success Team may reject the check prior to ACIC submission, meaning that the check will need to be resubmitted, potentially at additional time and cost to your business.

After a recent spot audit of checks submitted via the WorkPro portal, we found some simple improvements that could help client administrators to raise the quality of information being entered, thereby reducing the chance of the check being rejected, or inaccurate or incomplete results being returned.

Here are some tips, particularly regarding the applicant role and associated industry, to ensure the check can be accurately and consistently interpreted by ACIC or the police.

• While it might seem obvious, a role can be a position title such as “CEO”, an occupation such as “plumber”, or an entitlement such as “teacher registration”.
• The industry should describe the proposed place of work. Ideally you need to include the name of the organisation such as “ABC Nursing Home”, the type of workplace such as “aged care”, and – particularly if the applicant will be working in multiple sites – it is also necessary to provide the state/s where the work will be undertaken.

Additionally, when you make a request to an applicant, you need to elect if they have any contact with vulnerable people – whether that be supervised or unsupervised contact. This information then appears on the check certificate.

If the applicant provides a previous name or alias, they are required to upload an identity document in that name. An extra field has been added to the identity section to meet this requirement.

So if you’re seeking to improve and streamline your employment screening procedures, WorkPro can assist. Interested? Click here for further information on background checks today.