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Employers must exercise due diligence in prescreening and hiring employees in order to avoid potential workplace problems and costly litigation.
EVERY EMPLOYER fears the discontented or unbalanced worker who commits a violent act. Yet quite often the ordeal continues, even after the arrest or conviction of the Employee.
Problems can arise if you hire employees with dangerous or violent inclinations: If you hire an employee who has a dangerous or violent nature, that employee may be put into a sitnation - by you where he/she could injure another employee or customer. If that happens, the injured person (whether a member of the public or another employee) is going to hire an attorney to sue you if you engaged in "negligently hiring" this person.
What Is Negligent Hiring?
"Negligent hiring" is a legal term that describes the situation that prevails when a company violates its basic duty of care. What that means to individuals ordinarily involved in the hiring process is that they will be questioned as to whether they took all reasonable steps that they should have or could have taken to identify whether the applicant had any past problems with misconduct or unfit behavior.
More and more businesses are being held liable for the reprehensible behavior of their employees. Recent court rulings say that if you are contacted by a company that is doing a pre-employment check of a former employee of yours, you must reveal any serious misconduct on the part of your former employee. Although you may prefer not to disclose such information, withholding it could put you at risk.
California's Supreme Court recently ruled that employers who give favorable job references for exemployees are legally obligated to mention any misconduct involving violence or acts that physically endangered other individuals. Another California decision involved an employer who gave glowing references for a middle school vice principal, despite having knowledge that the man had been dismissed or forced to resign from several other school systems for molesting students. The court held that by deliberately giving this individual a favorable job reference, the employer was negligent and liable for the former employee's subsequent behavior. That may seem harsh, but it is the law - at least in California.
The majority of court...