Your reputation is your brand. In today’s world reputation is created less by marketing and advertising and more by the people in your company. With #MeToo impacting brands from Ernst & Young to Nike, paying attention to who you hire is key to your brand reputation. Jim Mintz, CEO of the Mintz Group, spoke to the American Marketing Association New York about the importance of background checks. The Mintz Group is a company with international reach that specializes in finding and analyzing hidden business facts anywhere in the world. The Mintz Group has thought through background checking from A to Z with 26 specific types of inquiries companies may wish to conduct. He recommends matching background checks to the real risks, recognizing that different levels of employees represent different levels of risk to your brand.

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Host: Lisa Merriam

00:00     Brand is another word for reputation; what your customers think about you, what they remember, and what motivates them.

00:11     Reputation is created less by marketing and more by the people you hire and what they do.

00:17     That’s why taking care in hiring is so important to your brand.

00:24     The American Marketing Association New York caught up with Jim Mintz, the CEO of the Mintz Group, a company that specializes in finding and analyzing hidden business information anywhere in the world.

00:38     Jim gave us his take on background checking the people you’re thinking of hiring.

 

Jim Mintz:

00:42     The people who work for your company you represent your brand, represent your company.

00:47     People come to the job with a sort of a shining shield of how perfect and seamless their past has been and that shield is their resume, their CV.

01:04     What we begin with is trying to understand who this person really is and see whether the resume fairly represents where they’ve been and what they’ve done.

01:14     In the past, it’s really looking for trouble in a person’s background and that trouble can be

issues with their resume, but also issues independent of what you see on a resume;

01:24     lawsuits and tax liens and drunk driving charges, and that kind of paper that one can leave behind that would indicate patterns in a person’s life.

01:38     Employers increasingly are concerned partially driven by the #MeToo movement. Concerned about a person’s style, management style.

01:46     And so increasingly we are looking at whether a person is a sort of bully in the workplace or whether a workplace that they bossed was the so-called frat boy atmosphere.

02:02     Those kinds of cultural issues are increasingly important to your next employer.

02:09     We recommend to our clients different levels of background checking for different levels of

Employees.

02:13     We compiled the 26 things that one can do to check someone’s background and we gave them each a letter from A to Z.

02:24     And then we apply those checks to particular levels of prospective employees, depending on what the risk is in hiring them.

02:37     If you’re going to hire an entry-level person, you may or may not care about something you’d find on their social media feed.

02:42     But if you’re going to hire somebody for a CEO spot and that person is going to represent your

company out in the world as your sort of ambassador,

02:52     you might care deeply about some racist or off-color thing on their social media a

02:59     We live today in a transparent world where after you hire someone, their background and reputation will be for all to see.

03:09     And news, good or bad, news travels far and fast on the Internet.

03:16     So it’s more important today than ever to in effect look before you leap into a new relationship with someone

03:25     who after all, their reputation is about to become your reputation.

 

Host: Lisa Merriam

03:27     Making sure the people you hire are good for your company culture and brand

03:32     That’s brilliance and marketing.