Home Health & Hospice Week

Are you running a Motor Vehicle Report too early?

Employee turnover is a fact of life, and even agencies with the highest retention rates still need to hire new staff on a regular basis — especially if they are growing. Make sure your agency doesn’t risk liability by knowing that all of your bases are covered when it comes to writing an offer letter and putting together a new hire paperwork package.

Watch out: There’s a chance you’re making a now-illegal mistake if you aren’t conducting the new hire process by following certain steps in order.

Your offer letters must include several crucial things — make sure it has the following components, says Barbara Freet, CEO of Human Resource Advisors in Walnut Creek, California:

• Title of the position;
• The position’s supervisor;
• The rate of pay (either hourly or monthly; not just the annual salary);
• The classification of the role as either exempt or nonexempt;
• The starting date of the position;
• A statement pointing the prospective employee to the employee handbook for more information on benefits; and
• Make sure to note any special contin­gencies in the offer letter, as well.

Pay special attention to the benefits section. Freet cautions that outlining the employee’s benefits in detail could be problematic later on, if you, as an employer, wish to adjust a benefit.

The problem: If benefits are outlined in detail on the offer letter, the employee can say that she accepted the offer contingent on those benefits, Freet explains. It’s easier to keep your employee handbook updated and just point employees and prospective employees to that for reference, instead.

Look to State, Federal Laws Too

You need to provide other information to your prospective employee, but the specific information depends on your particular state. Some examples include rules, regulations, or policies surrounding temporary disability insurance or state disability insurance, workers’ compensation, and paid family leave, Freet says.

To fully onboard a prospective employee, make sure to complete all of the other paperwork surrounding a new hire.

The U.S. Department of Labor has a handy checklist for employers that specifies the forms required at the federal level. These forms include:

• Employment Eligibility Verification, I-9 (see related story, this page),
• Federal Withholding Form, W-4, and
• State Withholding Form.

Don’t forget other information that you need at a company level, such as a direct deposit form and a form to collect pertinent information about the prospective employee, such as emergency contacts.

If you’re tempted to look into a prospective employee’s motor vehicle history with a Motor Vehicle Report (MVR) before letting them drive on behalf of your agency’s official business or you’d like to run a background check, you can’t do so without a conditional offer of employment letter, Freet says. If you’d like to run either of those checks, write your offer of employment letter conditional on the prospective employee passing the respective checks.

Important: If a prospective employee’s background check reveals issues that don’t directly affect the performance of duties in the intended role, you may not be able to make a hiring decision based on that information, Freet says.

If you ask for a job applicant’s conviction or arrest history, research your local and state laws to make sure that doing so is legal. “Nationwide, 35 states and over 150 cities and counties have adopted what is widely known as ‘ban the box’ so that employers consider a job candidate’s qualifications first — without the stigma of a conviction or arrest record,” says attorney Beth Avery with the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in New York, in the NELP Fair Chance Toolkit.