While Title VII and the EEOC are, respectively, a federal law and a federal agency, the individual states have been given a fair amount of latitude regarding their policies on hiring practices and potential hiring discrimination. This is so much the case, in fact, that the applicable laws and regulations vary widely from state to state: what is acceptable in one state may not be acceptable in another. While space here does not permit the listing of all fifty states and their policies (and such a list would be obsolete in short order anyway), we shall give an overview of the categories and types of regulations that are most in flux. Of course, it is a very good idea to check current regulations in your specific state before formulating any policies.
The noticeable trend is that employers are less free to hire and fire employees without justified reason. For about a decade, coinciding with the advent of the widespread use of the Internet, employers were able to find out information about job applicants much more easily than before. This led to what many saw as widespread abuses, as most persons’ objective view as well as federal law was that it was unjustified to deny employment to someone based on factors that did not affect that person’s ability to perform the job in question.
Now, there exist and continue to proliferate a host of regulations forbidding specific discrimination based on background checks: for instance, in Nevada, it is illegal to use sex-offender registry information to deny an applicant a job that involves no contact with the public, or only with segments of the public that would not be at risk. In Oregon for some time, and in more and more states now, it has been/is illegal to discriminate against applicants based on the results of a credit report, unless the job in question specifically relates to fiscal responsibility. This type of distinction, in Title VII issues as well, is very important: the disqualification must be specific and job-related. It would be permissible to deny an applicant with a poor credit score a job as a bank officer; it would not be permissible to deny him a job as a teller. A generalized feeling that a person is untrustworthy or unreliable is not sufficient. The latter is partially driven by the recent recession and the utter destruction of many individuals’ credit histories; the fear (probably justified) is that hiring practices based on credit scores could create a new underclass of virtually unemployable people.
Ordering Your First Employee Background Check 