What You Need to Know About Employers Who Check Your Background

It depends. Many CRAs report traffic infractions as part of the background check.

What will my employer see if they do a background check?

However, GoodHire does not unless an employer specifically requests a check on your driving record as they might for jobs that require use of motor vehicles , then speeding tickets and other infractions will appear. Driving under the influence DUI is a criminal offense and does show up on a background check. In some states, convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs may also be reported through a Motor Vehicle Records Search. Open arrest warrants issued when law enforcement gives evidence that a suspect has committed a crime and bench warrants issued for failure to appear for a scheduled court proceeding generally do not appear as records themselves in background checks.

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Once a warrant has been executed, it becomes part of the criminal record, and its existence may be reflected in a criminal background check. Do dismissed charges show up on a background check? Cases resulting in dismissal may appear in some criminal background checks, and sometimes, even if the court has sealed case records, the arrest that led to the case may appear in a criminal-background search.

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Do restraining orders show up on a background check? A restraining order known as an order protection in some states is considered a civil matter. It generally will not appear in a criminal background check, unless included as a footnote in the sentencing portion of a criminal record, but it may appear in public information databases and websites used by some pre-employment screeners.

Violations of these orders are criminal matters, however, and arrests and court cases surrounding them will appear in criminal background checks. Do bankruptcies show up on a background check? Because they are a matter of public record, bankruptcies are generally easy to discover and filings more than 10 years old may appear in non-FCRA compliant background checks. Do expunged or sealed records show up on a background check?

When a court expunges a conviction or trial record, the case files are sealed off from public access, and the convicted party or defendant does not have to disclose the case when asked about their criminal history. Sealed cases are not eligible for disclosure in most pre-employment background checks.

If there is a significant time delay between the resolution of a case and the decision to expunge it, its records may continue to appear in criminal-background database searches until records are updated to reflect the expungement. The existence of expunged convictions that involve mistreatment of children or other vulnerable individuals may be legally reported in Level 2 background checks, though unsealing the details of those records typically requires a court order.

The contents of background check reports can vary considerably, depending on the nature of information required by the employer, and the number and quality of the information resources used by the screening company. The best way to ensure a check complies with federal and local regulations is to work with an FCRA-compliant background check provider , such as GoodHire. And the best way to see what will appear on your FCRA-compliant background check is to run one on yourself. Disclaimer: The resources provided here are for educational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice.

We advise you to consult your own counsel if you have legal questions related to your specific practices and compliance with applicable laws. Jim Akin is a Connecticut-based freelance writer and editor with experience in employee relations, media relations, and social-media outreach. He has produced content and managed internal communications, business-to-business outreach, and consumer-focused campaigns for clients including Experian, VantageScore Solutions, Pitney Bowes, Medtronic, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola. A pre-employment background check provides important details to make Should You Regularly Screen Employees?

What shows up on a pre-employment background check?

Get Started. Gorman whose conviction record had been unearthed by Business Information Group which did the investigation on behalf of the Aegon Financial Services Group, the company handling the licensing process.

It was up to Gorman, the victim, to set the record straight. Eleven days passed before he was able to return to work. But a year later, he still felt that his career had stalled because of the accusation. In a lawsuit filed in the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia from which the preceding story was drawn , Gorman accused the three companies of libel and slander, charging that they had failed to exercise due diligence by not checking identifying details on the background report.

The companies denied his charges, but a year later, settled with Gorman out of court for an undisclosed sum. Stefan Keller, president of Business Information Group, says the company's error rate is extremely low and that mistakes sometimes stem from errors in source materials, such as court documents.

Vanguard and Aegon declined to comment. Companies that don't adequately screen employees leave themselves open to huge risks, and the results can range from embarrassing to tragic. In spring, James J. And in New Jersey, a year-old former nurse named Charles Cullen confessed to killing more than 30 patients by lethal injection at medical facilities across the country. There's intense pressure on companies to defend themselves against these kinds of mistakes and subsequent lawsuits for negligent hiring by doing background checks. But companies' reliance on credit histories, criminal backgrounds and other records to make hiring decisions has led to a smaller but more common set of risks.

Identities get mixed up. Records are incomplete. Outdated information comes back to haunt job seekers. Mistakes, once made, are hard to correct; and employees may feel that their privacy has been invaded, or their civil liberties violated. The situation is made worse by a growing number of vendors relying on databases that supposedly cull information from courthouses across the nation, but that may fail to adhere to legal and professional standards.

The faulty information that these checks can produce could also means that convicted felons' records come back clean.

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The consequence, some say, is that more and more civil lawsuits no one knows how many are being quietly settled out of court over background checks gone bad. When it comes to protecting their companies from employees who pose serious security risks, perhaps no tool in the CSO 's arsenal is as powerful as the background check.

CSOs, who by the very nature of their jobs are accustomed to having their own backgrounds come under intense scrutiny, may not think twice about investigating someone else's. But with this power comes a considerable burden; CSOs need to ensure that such screening is done legally, fairly and accurately, or risk disqualifying or endangering good employees. Even in the best of circumstances, though, it would be foolish to believe that background checks alone will protect organizations against employees with bad intentions.

People are "the most critical aspect of any security program," says James Mecsics, vice president of corporate security at credit bureau Equifax which does credit checks, criminal investigations and drug testing on people it plans to hire. But, he warns, "If you hang your hat on background investigations alone, you have a false sense of security. That's terrible to say, but it's the truth. Many lawsuit-shy companies have gone mum about former employees.

Yet what good is it to know that Joe Smith left the company on July 26 if you don't also know that he was caught stealing?

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To cope with the information underload, companies are increasingly asking for job candidates' permission to turn to other sources. In a recent survey done by Jorgensen's group, 80 percent of HR professionals reported that their companies did at least some criminal background checks on prospective employees in , up from 51 percent in And 35 percent looked at candidates' credit records, compared with 19 percent seven years earlier.

The proliferation of different kinds of databases has helped to power these searches. Some of the large background screening companies such as ChoicePoint and First Advantage have been compiling vast databases of public records that were previously available only to researchers who went to a bevy of local courthouses and did a labor-intensive "hand search" on a particular person. Smaller companies such as National Background Data have similar databases that they sell wholesale to small background check companies.

All these databases promise quick and inexpensive access to criminal records, sexual offender registries, motor vehicles bureaus and other repositories from across the country, but their results are incomplete and often out-of-date. The major credit bureaus also have amassed detailed records on nearly everyone in the country. A full report includes everything from outstanding balances on credit cards to bankruptcy filings, which some companies believe helps them to identify employees who are unreliable or susceptible to bribery.

Consumer advocates, however, fear that this type of data is used unfairly when the job opening has no financial responsibilities. Meanwhile, the fallout from Sept. The Patriot Act, for instance, requires states to conduct criminal investigations on all 3.

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The Sarbanes-Oxley Act also intensified the need for companies to trust their employees. As a result, the demand for qualified screeners has become so acute that, in May, an official from the federal Office of Personnel Management, testifying before a U.

What shows up on a criminal history background check?

House of Representatives committee, used the word stretched to describe the nation's resources for conducting background checks. Industry has responded. The top five players U. Lampeter chooses to keep his screening operations largely in-house.