If you run a company or are in charge of hiring new employees for a business, it’s essential for you to run employee background checks on any new, potential employees. In doing so you can help ensure you don’t hire someone who is unqualified or unfit to work at your company. Criminal background checks are an essential HR tool to ensure workplace safety, integrity and profitability. Here are a couple of interesting statistics:

  • 1 out of 3 Americans has a criminal record.
  • Over 42M Americans have lied on their resume at least once.

Background checks have a slew of perks — but they also have a drawback, which is that they can take time and, in turn, hold up the hiring process. However, it’s still possible to do a thorough accurate background check for potential employees at your company — and not wait months for your results. Here’s how.

The Challenges of Doing Quick Background Checks

When doing a background check on an applicant, you want to have the most thorough results in the shortest amount of time. Every background check done should at the very least, pull from every county in the country. That way, you can ensure you know about infractions, felonies and misdemeanors in any part of the country.

However, it’s impossible for companies to go to all of the counties in each state and find out if someone has committed a crime. That’s not only too pricey but also too time-consuming for any company to undertake.

Each county has different requirements that a potential employer must meet to obtain the records. Some records can be accessible on microfilm, but in some counties, you must wait in line for a court clerk to pull the file. This can take 4-7 business days — which is a significant chunk of time to have to wait during the hiring process. Also, another problem is finding out what county courthouse to go to — you may not know where a job candidate has previously lived or worked.

How Background Check Companies Do Thorough Checks Quickly

One process that background check companies use takes advantage of integrating different databases. For example, background check companies may use State and County Department of Corrections, County Arrests, County Warrants, Administrative Office of Courts, Sex Offender Registry, Terrorist Watch List, Police Department Most Wanted, Circuit Court, District Court and more to look at a job candidate’s criminal history. Background companies call this process a National Criminal Database check — and it can ensure you’re getting a good look at the criminal history of a job candidate, no matter where he/she lived or worked before.

Also, background companies, like Origin, may use a social security trace to check out a person, which is an address history database that pulls bills and credit cards in your name. A social security trace can give clues to where a person lived, so that you can accurately discover and judge relevant background information.

Drawbacks and Benefits of the Process Background Check Companies Use to Check Backgrounds

Using a background check company to check the National Criminal Database is a good start to getting a thorough history of a potential job candidate. However, there is one drawback: not all of the data is updated in real time, updating it takes too long, or records were expunged and never updated. In contrast, the benefits are many — including that that you can look at the whole country, and if there you can get the result back within a few hours, whether there is nothing on the record, or if it needs adjudication.

Adjudication Of A Background Check

Experienced adjudicators, like Origin, go through the raw data and make sure that it’s the right person. For example: John Smith, Jose Diaz, Mike Williams are very popular names and raw data comes up for them in every state.
By using a service like Origin, you can be sure that you stay compliant with the FCRA and ensures that you are making quality hires who will help you company thrive and flourish.