You probably know what employment background checks are… you might have even had them run on you in the past. But do you really know what an employment background check includes? And if you are responsible for or are assisting with your company’s hiring… do you know what you should be asking for when you ask for “background checks”?
When Loss Prevention Systems runs employment background checks for Retailers, most are interested in a potential employee’s previous criminal record. In many States we can look at their record “State wide”. This means that we access the Crime Information Center for that State. That database is maintained by each State. For example, in Georgia, it is the Georgia Crime Information Center (GCIC) and it is run by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. All State, City and County arrest and conviction records in the state of Georgia are fed into this system. It is the same database used when a Police Officer stops someone in a traffic stop and “checks their record”.
There is no such thing as a “Federal Records Check”. It does exist but civilians do not have any access to it under any circumstances. If a company tells you they do, they are outright lying. The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) is restricted only to Law Enforcement. It is a serious felony for someone to access it. Many years ago I asked a Congressman why we could not have legitimate access to NCIC. His response is that it will never happen as unemployment would rise sharply. Wow, they do not care if we hire criminals, have thefts and crimes caused by them, they just do not want unemployment to rise?!?!?
Not all States have State wide records checks available. In that case we run them by county. The trick is to figure out which counties. We can make an educated guess based on where the applicant indicates they have lived. However, we frequently find that applicants will lie or omit a location where they have lived that is associated with criminal records. So what is the solution?
How about “social trace”? Ever heard of that? No, it’s not a new thing on Facebook or Twitter. It’s a check that we run on an individual’s social security number that allows you to know what states and addresses the person has lived in and what other names they could have used. Sometimes, we get a red flag because a female’s maiden name wasn’t listed and pops up as an alias, which is pretty common and obviously nothing to worry about… but other times, we get a red flag on a social trace because the individual has used entirely different aliases—not misspellings, completely different names!
When we run an employment background check for a customer, we like to run a Social Trace first. This tells us then where to search the criminal records. That keeps you in control, not the applicant. By the way, Social Traces are really inexpensive.
We see it all around here. To date “the record” is held by an applicant that had over 50 pages of arrests and convictions. Many of those were VERY serious crimes that were recent. This is the kind of person that you would never want near your family, friends or employees. There’s no telling what a new day will bring. But for you, and your company, trust us when we say that it’s better for you to find out first.
If you’re not running a social security trace on your potential new hires, you could be missing out on crucial information that will keep your workplace environment safe and hold down on employee theft.
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