Many people believe that once an offender has been punished, they deserve the opportunity to start afresh. This though, isn’t quite the same as believing that the ‘slate is wiped clean’.
Many people may be prepared to give someone with a questionable past a chance but it may be that you’d like to know the details before making your yes/no decision. If you don’t know the facts, then you’re not being given the opportunity to think about things and make your own mind up.
Special Circumstances
There are clearly certain situations where you may be doubly keen to know something about someone’s history.
If, for example, you’re offering them a job that involves access to large amounts of cash or other valuables, then you just may want to know if they’ve a history of larceny or fraud etc. If they have, it may not mean you’ll say ‘no’ but at least you’ll be making an informed decision with all the facts to hand.
It may be even more important if you’re recruiting someone to work with children or vulnerable people – in fact, in some States a background check may be a mandatory requirement depending upon the type of occupation involved.
Not only employment is an issue. Perhaps you are contemplating a major business partnership or joint venture that involves a large chunk of your capital being either directly or indirectly in somebody else’s hands. You may just want to be informed if the other party has a criminal history involving corporate fraud and irregular deals etc!
A Criminal Background Check
There are various ways you can go about trying to reduce your risks by finding out more about people you’re planning to employ or deal with.
The first and most obvious one is to ask them about their background. There is of course the risk that you’ll receive lies in response but sometimes it’s possible to get a feeling from what a person is saying, whether or not they’re trying to hide something. Don’t rely exclusively on that of course because however worldly-wise you may think you are, a practised deceiver could easily pull the wool over your eyes.
It may be much safer to be a little more scientific about it via a criminal background check.
This can be performed in any one of a number of ways and as with so much in life, you’ll tend to find that the results you get depend to some extent upon how much you pay.
Résumé Checks And Free Internet Lookups
If you have the person’s résumé, you can check individual reference components looking for false entries or suspicious gaps in chronology etc. You can telephone past employers and references etc.
You can also pay companies that will check someone’s résumé for you in a little more depth and using more expertise than perhaps you personally can bring to bear.
Keep in mind though that this sort of checking is really entry-level. Résumés and references can easily be fakes and they can be tricky to verify. Even if it is all perfectly OK, it won’t necessarily highlight that the person has a criminal background.
You can also run a free (or very low cost) check on the person by using one of the very large number of criminal background check agencies now advertising on the web. These may be able to highlight aspects of the individual’s background, such as criminal convictions, that they’re trying to hide.
To get this done, you’ll need to have some key basic information about the individual to hand including:
- their full name
- any previous names
- unmarried surname if it’s a married female
- current address
- age and date of birth
- social security number, driver’s license number etc
- previous addresses.
Not having any of these pieces of information will make the search more prone to error.
Payable Internet Searches
The trouble with free or very low cost searches is that they may use only limited information sources. Some may be based on a specific State, which is fine, except that people have a habit of moving around and crossing State borders.
It’s also worth remembering that something called ‘de-duplication’ can be tricky for relatively simple database searches where you don’t have a unique identifier such as social security number. The problem arises because names and ages are not unique – in any state there may be thousands upon thousands of “ J. Smiths” born in the same year. Telling one from the other isn’t always easy.
Using a payable service usually means that there will be some human intervention involved that’s able to use some judgement and interpretation based upon your supplied information to try and ensure that you’ve got a good and correct match on the person you’re actually looking for.
They may also be able to access nation-wide facts rather than just local.
Using A Detective
Although it may sound like something out of a 1940s movies, there are various agencies that specialise in people’s background checks using a wide variety of methods and at times, plain old-fashioned leg-work.
These may be some of the more expensive routes but the results may be a step above the simpler or heavily automated on-line searching.
In the final analysis, the method you use and the amount you pay for it needs to be proportionate to your perception of the risk. If you are asking someone to wash your car once per week then perhaps no check or a very basic one will be fine. If, on the other hand, you want someone to work in your jewellery store manning the counters and tills, well, perhaps you’ll be prepared to pay a little extra to find out exactly who it is you’re dealing with!
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