Reasons to Perform Criminal Background Checks for Employees

Summary: Reasons why employee criminal background checks are important for today’s small business, medium business, and large corporations.

Your Business Should Run Criminal Background Check. To run a successful business of any size, you need to know if your employees have criminal pasts. This will greatly decrease the odds of people who have high odds of ending up stealing from your or worse. Employee criminal background checks are a great way to filter through job applicants. Criminal background checks for employees also will, in most cases allow insurance companies to provide a discounted group insurance rate for you and your employees.

The answer to all these problems you simply need to run criminal background checks on your employees. Whether your employees have worked for you for years or you are just starting to hire a new workforce. Criminal background checks can be the answer to your prayers and save your small or medium business time and money in the future. If current employees are disrupting work activities, and you need to know if they have a criminal past, you can get some insight by conducting a background check.

Criminal Background checks run by employers are a surprisingly common practice in today’s society. With the advances in internet technology, comes the advancement in criminals advancing in their unlawful practices. Today it does not take a muscle man with a rough exterior or a hardened criminal in the mafia to be a criminal. Anyone can commit crimes with ease due to technological advances. Internet predators, identity theft and more can be conducted by just about anyone. This is what makes it so scary for today’s employers and business owners. How can you really tell if you can trust your employees?

Criminal background checks are especially needed in certain industries, such as the banking and financial industries. It can be hard to trust others with sensitive information, especially when hiring new people. Running a background check is not a question of others privacy, it’s a questions of your safety and your business well being. You need to protect your business. Why lose everything you’ve worked so hard to create, at the hands of someone else? There is one way to know for sure and but your mind at ease. Conduct criminal background checks on your employees or potential employees. No, it might not be able to weed out any possible future criminals, but at least you can protect yourself and your business from past criminal offenders.

Conducting a background check is even easier than you would think. Criminal Background checks can be performed by contacting a private business that specializes in background checks, or do a simple internet search. Yes, the tool that helps many criminal commit their crime can also help you identify those criminals. Many companies exist on the internet which, for a small fee, will conduct the criminal background search for you.

Let’s face it, the world is a scary place, and you can save your business a lot of hassle, by conducting a simple background search. It’s a simple and effective tool which many employers already take advantage of. As an employer it is your responsibility to protect your business and your other employees. The best way to do this is by checking the background of all your employees. It is up to you is you want to take the risk of hiring someone that you know very little about, and bring that person into your business which you have worked so hard to build. Why shouldn’t you protect yourself and your other employees from the many unknown circumstances that can occur without a background check?

Details to Be Carefully Acquired for Criminal Background Checks

Criminal background checks are a good way to determine eligibility for employment or social services, but they are only as good as the persons performing the background check. There are many facets to a criminal background check that need to be utilized in a careful manner or the results will be unreliable.

All names that the person has used should be listed on the employee form. Many times, prospective employees forget to list maiden names or previous married names. All previous names used by employees need to be run against current background check databases. Spelling variations of names also need to be carefully investigated as misspellings of names are common. An example of a common misspelled name is listing Brian for Bryan. Close Date of birth dates for a closely matching name can identify the one criminal flag you were looking for to disqualify a future employee.

A criminal background check needs to have a good set of fingerprints taken. Up until 10 years ago, most prints were taken with printers ink and high quality paper cards. With the advent of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, these prints are now taken on a light sensitive screen. This has led to plethora of what is termed ‘bad prints’. These are prints that are not clear or are not fully rolled. A set of ten-prints that are not fully rolled can lead to a non-hit (where the individual is said to not have a record) when in reality they do. This can also lead to a misidentification (when an individual is said to have record and they do not) and that can lead to many legal problems for the subject of the background investigation.

Many officers are not thoroughly trained in how to take a good set of fingerprints, and as such do not know the quality that is required. Fingerprint taking is usually only covered for a week or two during a 2 or 4 year degree for law enforcement, and this requirement should be changed. If a candidate was required to take a standard quarter class on fingerprint taking (along with latent, palm, and partial 10-print taking) there would be a drastic improvement in the database that is used by law enforcement agencies all over the country. They would also learn what the fingerprint technician is looking for in regards to making a positive identification.

When performing an employee background check, it is important to ensure you have the exact spelling of the individuals name, all previous names of the applicant are noted, and an accurate fingerprint was acquired.