When you have a criminal record, it can make things like getting a job difficult. But when the company providing criminal background checks isn’t ensuring accuracy, sends over someone else’s records, or simply doesn’t care about the quality of their work, your future can be severely impacted by something that is completely unfair and out of your control. [Read more…]
Legal Limitations to Private Investigations
Personal safety, criminal investigations and background checks for potential employees are just some of the reasons why private investigators are called in for their expertise.
Knowledge of one person’s activities and their history can go a long way in making relationship or hiring decisions. This knowledge can even prove guilt or innocence of a crime. [Read more…]
How Much Can Potential Employers Ask About You?
NPR ran a story last week by the same title, discussing what exactly employers have a right to know when they are thinking about hiring you. More and more are conducting criminal background checks, but some are also checking credit reports and even social networking habits. Just how far can they go and how can a criminal conviction affect your ability to get a job? [Read more…]
Hiring Applicants with Criminal Histories
Rules were established in 1987 governing the hiring of applicants with criminal records. These guidelines, set forth by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were designed to help control how employers looked at such applicants and in what scenarios they could deny employment based on a criminal record. [Read more…]
Should Criminal Histories Be Given an Expiration Date?
An op-ed in the New York Times this week makes an interesting proposal—that criminal histories should only be used against job applicants for a certain period of time. Alfred Blumstein, professor of urban systems and operations research at Carnegie Mellon University, and Kiminori Nakamura, associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, wrote that people are paying for their crimes for much too long and that no one benefits from excluding those with criminal histories from employment and housing when they have remained crime-free for a number of years. [Read more…]
Criminal Histories and Flawed Background Checks
When you are convicted of a criminal offense, you carry that conviction with your indefinitely, sometimes for the rest of your life. But sometimes, people who have never even been arrested find themselves being disqualified from a job due to a criminal record. A lengthy report from the New York Times discusses why this happens and what’s being done to protect those folks who simply want to work. [Read more…]
