I was on the Jerri Willis Report tuesday
http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/willis-report/videos#p/157870/v/3974561102001
Discussing background, credit and other kinds of “checks” that employers can and will do before you are hired. Just this week one of our excellent sales candidates who is had a 15 year history of knocking it out of the park for three excellent high-tech firms, failed a drug test. Yeah you read right. He failed a drug test. The company used a hair sample to discover cocaine in his body. He had reported for his first day of work and was summarily dismissed. This was the last guy in the whole world you would ever imagine to have cocaine in his bloodstream. He is in his early 40’s, in great shape and had been not just successful but extremely successful in the sales jobs he said.
80% of employers are going to do some kind of background checks on you as a candidate. 35% to 40% are going to do a credit check. My estimate is that 25% of the candidates that are close to getting hired get eliminated because of something a company finds either in their background check, credit check or social media review.
There are third party companies that provide these kinds of services to employers. The depth and the thoroughness of the checks really varies. Some of the services simply go to public records about arrest records, DWI’s, bankruptcies, tax liens, Judgments and verification of a degree or college attendance. More sophisticated, and expensive services dig deeper into public as well as private information like exact dates of employment, salary history, and character assessment ( like interviewing your neighbors).
If a company you are applying to uses a third-party service, they have to get your written permission to conduct a background check. Technically, if they don’t hire you because of what they find, they have to tell you the reason. Well, they are suppose to tell you the reason. Nine out of 10 organizations, if they find something they don’t like, are not going to tell you what they found or why they are not hiring you. They are simply going to say that they have moved on to another candidate.
Companies are relying more and more on these kind of checks because other information, like reference checking your past employers, are harder and harder to do. Most companies have very strict policies about giving previous employment references and some simply won’t do it. Prospective employers, then resort to extensive third-party background and credit checks.
As a job candidate, you might as well assume that accompany your interviewing with is going to do an extensive background check, credit check, educational check and anything short of a proctology exam. Complaining about this is useless. Hoping you can avoid them is wishful thinking. You best assume that anyone you interview with is going to do extensive checks.
90% of the people that have any kind of issues in your background, know it. Once in the rare while, a candidate is surprised by what might show up with these kind of checks. So, in order to be prepared, a perspective job candidate should run background checks on themselves before it’s done by a prospective employer. It is essential that a job candidate know exactly what a prospective employer is going to find when they do these checks.
Next week: What to do with the information you get.
