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.

In this high tech, high speed world, computers and software technology are replacing much of what trained human beings have done for years. Pre-employment screening and pre-employment background checks are no different in this regard. Many software companies and date brokers have found that through the use of complex software programs they are able to search multiple sources of publically available, online information at once. These sources of data often include state incarceration records, online court information, public government databases and annually purchased “batch information� from various information vendors. The searches that are then offered by these Data Brokers are usually labeled as “National Criminal History Searches� or “National Criminal Database�. The problem is that these “National Searches� only include limited information from select states, counties and cities. There is no guarantee that the county, city or even state that your applicant resides in was searches. On top of the drawbacks of not knowing what sources were actually searched; applicants and employees with common names often fall victim to false positive criminal records. This is also the result of having computers do the thinking for you.

With private investigators on the other hand, applicants are screened by qualified, trained and experienced private investigators. The information that is searched is “direct source� information, meaning that is comes directly from the court, city or state where the data originated. This minimizes the chances that there are data entry errors and also cuts down on processing time and costs. Additional benefits include the ability to feel certain that an experienced investigator has personally conducted the searches and reviewed the incoming information. During this process, we are able to catch false positives and make certain that the results that are being reported are accurate and pertain to your applicant and not someone else.