Why is Identity Verification Important in Freelancer and Contractor Hiring

Your business can only be successful if it is run well. Ultimately, this comes down to the employees, both permanent and freelance. The more reliable and the higher their standard of work, the better you can run your business. The number of freelance online workers is steadily increasing. So is the need to make sure their identities can be verified. However, technology develops at a fast pace and just about nothing concerning the online world is written in stone. Just as quickly as identity verification software improves, fraudsters will find ways to work around it.

Work Has Gone Global

As the internet develops, a whole lot of new avenues of work open up. With only a computer and an internet connection you can work just about anywhere – and for anyone. The pandemic also played a hand in this new work set-up, with an increasing number of people working from home, possibly on a freelance basis and even on several projects at one time.

Employers have also found advantages to employing online freelancers. They are no longer limited to looking for staff within your immediate area but rather search for staff from around the globe.

The Need for Identity Verification

It makes sense that it’s always easier to verify someone’s identity if you meet them in the flesh for an interview. If you’re hiring a remote freelancer, you need to find other ways to verify their identity. On the other hand, if you’re a freelancer, it’s important to know who you’re going to be working for. Hence a thorough identity verification process is essential for both parties.

Ensuring your identity is verified can help protect you legally and financially in case of disputes or fraud. In this digital age, utilizing reliable online identity verification services can be invaluable for both employers and freelancers.

Any freelancers you employ will need to supply identity documents, income tax information, and any special clearance certificates, such as a police clearance certificate.

Maintaining the Standards and Ethos of Your Business

Unfortunately, identity theft continues to be an issue and can have potentially huge implications when it comes to hiring personnel, especially freelancers.

Here are just some of the other reasons for verifying the identity of freelancers you potentially want to work with:

Standard of Work

If you don’t verify the identity and work standard of a freelancer you hire for a project, there is a possibility that they may not produce the standard, or even type, of work you are looking for.

At the very basic level, you could hire someone experienced in a particular area, such as copywriting. If they begin to produce substandard and even problematic writing. You’ll stand to lose money or even clients. If you can verify their identity long before this, you’ll save your business some money and reputation.

Data Security

Depending on the industry, remote professionals often have access to a lot of data. Some of this is personal and confidential. You need to be assured that anyone you employ will keep the data private.

Imagine if you hire someone for an IT role and they turn out to have stolen someone’s identity. While they are working on your projects, imagine the amount of damage they can do with the data they would have access to.

Identity Theft from Within

The issue of identity theft may come from within and you may find a freelancer using your data to commit identity fraud. They can contact clients, asking them to participate in certain projects or other potential money-making schemes that are scams they are running themselves.

The victims will be able to verify the identity of the fraudster simply by contacting the company they legitimately work for. The only problem is that the scheme they are interested in isn’t legitimate, or even part of the company.

You can’t afford for this type of scam to be run from within your company. So it’s essential to verify the identity of any freelancer in the first place.

Employee Verification: Full-time vs. Freelancers

If someone works for you in a full-time, office-based position, you get to know them and can verify their identity each time they sign in to work. Even when you employ them, they will need to produce hard copies of some of their documents and you can compare them to their photographic identity and the like.

When you employ someone for online positions, it is not quite so easy. Like the online world, especially with the fast growth of AI, it’s possible to produce just about anything that looks genuine. You must be able to verify the identity of anyone you employ for a remote position.

Even then, managing people in remote full-time positions is relatively unproblematic, with checks and balances on the amount of contact they have with the business.

The nature of the work environment is that freelancers are hired only for a contract position at a time. This means they aren’t necessarily subject to the same security checks and scrutiny that full-time appointments are. This is something you need to guard against by using an identity verification system.