by Arielle Robinson
Mableton’s City Council took further steps to move the hiring process along and bring businesses to the city at its work session and council meeting on Valentine’s Day.
City council unanimously approved allowing the mayor to find a company to handle screening services for new city employees.
“We’re starting to hire,” Interim City Clerk Susan Hiott said. “And we’ve made an offer already and the offer letter—and this is practiced by all cities—is contingent upon a background check and a drug test. So that means that the city must have a company in place to run those background checks and do the drug testing.”
Hiott said that the city is deciding between three companies to handle screening. Those three are Paycom, Checkr, and SecureHire.
Currently, Paycom handles the city’s payroll. This seems to be the preferred option due to familiarity, but Hiott said the problem was the language behind the agreement Paycom sent about background checks. This is part of why the city is stuck between choosing three options.
Interim City Attorney Emilia Walker-Ashby said about Paycom’s agreement that “it had a lot of indemnification language that would require negotiation…for example, it said that if they were sued for certain purposes, which almost included any purpose, with respect to the services that they provided that the city would cover their defense and indemnify them and pay attorneys fees and etc., etc. It’s not unusual language, but it’s just language that you can typically leverage out of contracts by negotiation.”
Hiott also said that the City of Tucker uses SecureHire and was told by an employee there that SecureHire had the better contract. Hiott said the interim city attorney can help finalize which company Mableton will select.
“The bottom line is we have to have this,” Hiott said. “It’s a service we need to prevent any liability of hiring someone that may have something on…
Read the full article here
