A criminal background check will reveal an applicant’s county, state, and federal criminal history. It can help businesses avoid negligent hiring claims, protect their assets and reputation, and create a safe working environment.
A criminal background check also confirms that your candidates have the right to work in the US. This will protect your organization from fines for hiring unauthorized workers.
Reduces Risk of Fraud
In an era of data breaches and compromised information, knowing your candidates in advance is important. When incorporated into your screening policy and consistently applied, criminal background checks reduce the theft risk by uncovering an applicant’s history. In addition, a background check that includes a fingerprint search and searches for worldwide sanctions, watch lists, and politically exposed persons can further reduce the risk of fraud by ensuring your candidate is not attempting to use their position at your company to tamper with sensitive financial data.
Hiring a criminal can potentially cost your business in wasted resources, damage to reputation, and low employee morale. Additionally, failing to conduct a thorough background check may expose your business to liability if the employee acts violently or poses a safety threat.
With organized crime efforts to launder money through banks and other financial institutions on the rise, it’s even more important that businesses employ robust screening practices. Criminal background checks are just one tool that can be used to spot these efforts, but other products like identity verification can stifle them before they start.
Reduces Risk of Disruption
Hiring someone with a criminal record can disrupt your company. They might be a threat to other employees or customers and could even hurt your reputation. Additionally, a good hire can save your organization money in lost work time during training and lost revenue from replacing the worker.
Criminal background checks reduce the risk of this disruption by ensuring that you’re hiring people with clean records who can do their job. In addition, thorough screening can help avoid legal risks like negligent hiring lawsuits.
In many cases, it’s illegal to discriminate against an applicant based on a conviction or arrest record. That’s why background verification can be helpful in the hiring process, especially when your business or organization works with vulnerable groups like children and older adults or sensitive departments like finance.
A criminal background check can include a variety of searches, including national criminal and sex offender databases, county courts, and state/federal district courts. In addition, a background check can uncover financial stability through credit history searches that reveal bankruptcies, liens, and other indicators of trouble. The most comprehensive criminal checks also offer alias and address history searches that can help prevent employers from overlooking convictions that may have been committed under an alias or when an applicant legally changed their name.
Reduces Risk of Negligence
Many state laws have established a “duty of care” for employers to protect workers, customers, and the general public from harm an employee could cause, especially when the company knew or should have known that the worker was unfit. These cases often lead to negligent hiring lawsuits, which can be extremely costly for a business. Criminal background checks reduce the risk of such claims by ensuring your business hires people who do not threaten you, your team, or your clients.
A comprehensive check reveals criminal records, motor vehicle record violations, credit history issues, and even social media content that could affect your corporate culture or create a security risk. This information is compared against your job descriptions and policies to help you avoid hiring someone who may not be suitable for the job and who can hurt your brand.
Employers regularly screen all full-time, part-time, seasonal, and intern employees for criminal convictions to ensure the company is safe for its teams and clientele. A thorough background check is especially important for positions with access to confidential customer records, working with children or older people, or requiring special licensing and experience. A recent Society for Human Resource Management survey found that the severity of an offense and the relevance to the position would cause 84 percent of organizations to decline to hire a candidate.
Protects Employees
Employer reference checks help you gain deeper context about a candidate’s past criminal record. When paired with a name-based screening that scours 300 million national and state criminal records (including Most Wanted and Sex Offender Public Registry databases), employer references can help you determine whether or not an individual’s conviction is relevant to their ability to perform their job presently.
Depending on your industry, certain crimes may be more relevant than others. For example, a fine dining restaurant may require more in-depth background checks than a hole-in-the-wall cafe. Similarly, financial organizations must conduct criminal background checks to ensure their employees are not untrustworthy or may pose a risk of theft of the organization’s assets.
However, it is important to note that discriminating against individuals based on their previous criminal convictions could be illegal. To avoid this, ensure all candidates are subjected to the same rigorous screening process, and all searches are performed using the same criteria.
Furthermore, suppose an adverse action prompted by the results of a criminal record search prompts your company to decline employment. In that case, you must follow the FCRA’s and EEOC’s recommended guidelines for conducting a thorough individualized assessment.