The process of employee and applicant background checks, no matter how thorough, does not completely protect the employer against employee malfeasance, nor does it completely assure the employer that a candidate’s credentials are indeed genuine. The simple fact is that no one can predict the future, and this is certainly true of human behavior. Not every convicted criminal is a potential criminal; not every potential criminal (which, strictly speaking, probably includes everyone except the Pope) will, in fact, be a criminal. Not everyone with a clean record will stay clean (every criminal had a clean record before he committed his first crime), and not everyone who is qualified will, in fact, do his job well. Background checks can only tell you what occurred in the past, which as anyone knows, is an imperfect predictor of the future.
For example, you may recall that the term, “going postal” refers to the workplace shooting that occurred in Edmond, Oklahoma in a U.S. Post Office in 1986. Fourteen people were killed. Since that date, over fifty people have been killed in specifically Post Office workplace shootings, not to mention numerous other mass shootings in other workplaces. In the vast majority of cases, the shooter not only had no criminal record but no outward manifestations of instability up to that point. No background checks would have revealed the potential for these people to go berserk; again, as above, the past is a very imperfect predictor of future behavior.
Background checks cannot tell you about events in progress. For instance, if a person has been indicted for fraud, the time space between indictment and conviction (or other resolution) could be years. If a person has recent negative credit or employment history, that may not even show up on a background check report. And of course, a person having been fired from a job often doesn’t show up at all, and an applicant can usually fudge the missing time by attributing it to a sabbatical, illness, family matters, etc.
Also, background check information has to be weighed in context. Say a person has an arrest record but was not convicted of any crime as a result. Is the arrest record truly a negative in and of itself? After all, American jurisprudence as well as American social mores says that a person is innocent until proven guilty. To deny a job application based solely on an arrest record may both be unfair and run afoul of Title VII.
Ordering Your First Employee Background Check 