Ensuring an Employment Criminal Background Check Is Accurate 9 Nov 2017

For many employers, a criminal background check is one of the main reasons they choose to screen employees. For obvious reasons, few businesses want to hire individuals with a criminal history.

However, there are instances where the background check isn’t 100 percent accurate, and, say, the background check you’re running on a candidate comes back saying that he is a felon when in fact he has never even been issued a parking ticket.

So what happened? How can such a mistake happen, and what can you do about it?

Common causes

One cause of this might be that the person has the unfortunate luck to share the same birthday and name with a convicted felon. In these cases, the unfortunate candidate may have encountered this problem before and probably has taken the necessary steps to fix this mistake or have documentation proving they are not the criminal they are made out to be.

The other reason inaccurate information might show up in someone’s criminal history is if the company you hired to do the screening took some shortcuts that resulted in a mistake that could cost someone a job, and you a valuable employee.

What to do

As an employer, if you receive a negative criminal background check, the best thing to do is to tell the person about the information that came up. If there are any errors, the candidate has the right to file a dispute with the screening company. In these cases, the screening company has 30 days to investigate the claims, and if the candidate has additional information, the company may extend the investigation for a maximum of 45 days.

At this point, many employers would face the dilemma of whether to wait for the results of the investigation or to make an offer to another candidate. Either way, it can be a major inconvenience to an already complicated hiring process.

At Trusted Employees, we realize that there are many different ways for inaccuracies to show up on a background check. In addition to making a deep dive into county, state, national and international databases — along with a host of other records — we are meticulous in cross-checking the information you provide about your candidate with what we find in the databases.

This degree of diligence helps to ensure no inaccuracies arise, allowing you to extend a job offer with confidence.