Background Check News

We often get asked “what kind of things do you find when conducting pre-employment screening?” This is usually followed up by “how many of the employees that you screen actually have criminal records?”

Simply put, most employees and potential hires are not criminals and usually the amount of criminal records we locate depends on the employer we are working for and the industry the employee is in.

A quick sample of the last 100 or so employees that we screened shows a variety of charges that are pretty consistent with what we have seen over the many years we have been doing this. Charges of drunk driving, driving while license suspended, drug offenses, assault and retail theft are almost always the most common. These are usually followed by domestic violence, larceny, check fraud and burglary.

It is almost impossible to put an overall percentage on the amount of applicants and employees have criminal records because of the variety of the jobs these people apply for and geographic location where they live. For a particular client who supplies workers for manual labor jobs, it is not untypical to have 25%-30% percent of their applicants turn out to have some type of crime on their record. It should be noted that most of these crimes are misdemeanors.

It is however unfortunate that we rarely see people with more serious offenses applying for jobs. Those with sex offenses and violent crimes on their records are not often seen, which is scary to think because they are becoming employed, which means that they are working for companies who do not conduct background investigations at all. A lot of the time, these individuals seek out these companies because they don’t have to fear the background screening process in order to become employed.

The Christmas season is fast approaching and malls are beginning to hire seasonal workers; including Santa and his Elves. While some malls are taking the cautious approach by hiring Santa from companies who specialize in Santa placement, others are hiring off the street. Although Santa placement companies do exist, they are not the norm. These companies claim and probably do conduct detailed background investigations and drug tests on each of their Santas. What about the mall that you take your children to? Was Santa hired through a reputable company or does he fall into one of the more likely categories: a volunteer, a hire off the street or a friend of a mall employee who “does this type of work for fun around the holidays”. How can you be certain that the man your children are sitting on isn’t a criminal, or worse, a violent child predator? Although it would be difficult to obtain Santas name and run your own background check on him, you can contact the mall to see where Santa came from and if he was pre-screened for the job.

Hopefully, Santa was hired by the mall and run through a rigorous background investigation and drug panel. Despite this, thousands of unscreened Santas will be working at malls near you.

Background investigation companies have known about Facebook, MySpace and the dozens of other social networking sites for years. We often use these sites to look into an applicant’s personal life and make an estimation of what type of character that applicant has. Employers appear to be getting in on the action as well. Numerous news reports have documented the struggle between an individual’s privacy rights and the public availability of online information. Employers and background investigation companies argue that if an applicant puts themselves online for all to see, that there is no reason they should not be able to view that information and potentially use it to make hiring decisions.

Whether you agree or disagree with the use of social networking sites as a hiring tool, you should be aware that information available online can and will be viewed by people outside of your group of friends. Included in the list of major social networking sites that are often used are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Xanga, Frendster, LiveJournal and Flickr.

If you are an investigator, background screening company or employer, these sites are invaluable in determining if you are about to hire a class act or a class clown.