…twice this week, our firm had candidates who got eliminated from contention because of, one a history of DWIs and the other a history of bruised credit… The mistakes the candidates made weren’t so much that they had these in their background but that they didn’t inform interviewing and hiring authorities about them BEFORE they were going to get offers…

The challenge was that both candidates were told that, after a lengthy interviewing process, they were likely to get hired but their background had to be checked… neither candidate told the companies they were speaking to that they were likely to have problems in their background…

When the companies did their background checks and discovered two DWIs for one candidate and bruised credit for the other, they decided to turn each candidate down…

Now, it’s quite possible that neither candidate would’ve been hired because of these problems in their background… but the biggest mistakes the candidates made was NOT telling the hiring authorities that they had these glitches in their background BEFORE their backgrounds were checked… each hiring authority felt that the candidates had not been honest with them… and that feeling overrode the issue that these problems were in the candidates’ past…

If you have any kind of other problems like this that are going to show up in a reference or background check, you absolutely have to tell the hiring authority BEFORE the hiring authority discovers it on his own…

Over the years, we have seen many, many candidates get hired even with felonies in their background primarily because they told the hiring authority BEFORE the background check that they had a problem in their past.

If a candidate waits for the employer to discover these kinds of things without forewarning them, the employer’s trust is violated… and again, they are as upset with not being told as they are with the issue itself… the time to tell an employer that he or she may discover this in your background is when you find out you were a finalist and you are likely to get an offer once the background has been checked…

One of our candidates… the one with the DWIs… had done his own background check on himself and amazingly enough neither one of his DWIs showed up, so he figured there was a good chance that when the company did the background check, they wouldn’t find out about them… he shouldn’t have relied on this chance…

So, the lesson is if you have any kind of glitch in your background, you need to tell the hiring or interviewing authority before they do a background check… if they discover it and feel like you need to have told them, their trust will seem violated and it’s not likely you will get hired…