Stages of the Hiring and Background Check Process

As mentioned in the introduction, the process of hiring occurs in several stages. Different types and levels of background checks are appropriate for different stages of the process. Circumscribing a definite policy for background check procedures can save both time and money for the small business.

Many employers only conduct the first and not the final stages of the background check process. A recent major controversy involved a church employee in Texas who molested several children during a church sleepover; he had been placed in a supervisory role. The person who committed those acts had three felony and five misdemeanor convictions. While none of those convictions was specifically for child molestation or other sex crimes, the parents who sued the church argued—successfully—that the church had been negligent in not performing a background check on the offender. The church lost a large judgment.

Obviously, not all applicants need to have any background checks performed on them at all; usually, the majority of those who submit resumes will not even be considered for the position. The first time to think about background checks is when those half dozen or so resumes are pulled out of the stack. This would be a good time to perform a simple reference check, such as former employers, residence, and possibly educational history. Note here, as in further along in the process, that all searches of private (non-public) information must be done only with expressed written consent on the part of the applicant; most employment applications contain such permissions, along with a signature space, but resumes usually do not. The supplying of personal information by the applicant does not entitle the prospective employer to verify that personal information unless the abovementioned expressed written consent is given. This is why employers practicing due diligence ask candidates to fill out consent forms before conducting any checks.

The second stage, once the consent forms have been obtained and searches of basic information have been done, is to do job-specific background checks. Note that this is not confined to criminal history, and in fact, such searches should be confined to the last stage of the process. Rather, at a point roughly commensurate with the in-person interview, the candidate’s qualifications should be scrutinized. Licenses, certifications, and educational history should be verified. This is when a credit check should be done, if appropriate, and a driving history obtained, if appropriate.

 The final stage should only occur after a tentative hiring decision has been made and a job offer (contingent on a criminal background check) has been tendered. As the most involved and therefore the most expensive stage of the employee vetting process, a criminal background history check should only be done once the applicant has passed all other screening and the decision to hire him has been made.

Limitations of the Background Check Process

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.