Running a business is like doing anything else in life: it requires you to take risks. Something as simple as hiring an employee is a risk that businesses take regularly. However advanced their screening techniques might be, and however much research they’ve read that makes them think that they have a better insight into what someone might be like in the business environment, the only way to really find out is actually seeing how they do. The process, as it exists in its traditional form, is quite weird anyway. When you accept somebody’s CV for consideration, you are implicitly trusting that the information that you’re reading is true and a good reflection of its subject. However, this is obviously not always the case. A recent study found that in the UK, 38% of people lied on their CV, and who knows how many of those people lied in the survey?. The chances are good, if you are a business owner, that at least one in three of your employees lied to you before they’d even got the job. Interviews are skewed in their own way. A prospective employee will know that they need to impress their interviewers and will, therefore, try to present themselves in a light that they consider most advantageous. This may mean that they bend the truth a little bit, or lie by omission if they think that will improve their chances of getting the job. Either way, the truth is that to succeed in business, you have to embrace that chance and see how it goes.

That being said, there are many times when the best thing to do is try to minimise risk to the greatest possible degree. One of these situations is when you are dealing with potential threats to the security of your organisation. These can come in many different forms. For example, you may find that before you want to continue a transaction, you would like to verify who it is that you are dealing with. If you suspect that someone is pretending to be someone that they are not, they may be doing so because they have criminal intent. Thankfully, there are companies that can help: Jumio’s proprietary technology scans, validates and extracts the customer data from their ID. You can, therefore, be sure that you are doing business with a legitimate customer. This is especially important if you run an ecommerce business and you do not actually meet or ever speak to some your customers. Fraud is serious and if it happens to you, your business could be prevented from trading for a long time while it is investigated, or shut down altogether if you cannot acclimate the losses.

Since cybercrime and fraud are becoming more common, as nearly every business uses computers to store data, it is important that you invest money in educating all of your employees about your company’s security policy. While it may seem rather cynical, every employee that you have is a potential weakness when it comes to your online infrastructure. If they can not spot the signs of someone trying to convince them to share information that they shouldn’t, you will quickly find yourself in trouble.