When you are recruiting you want to be sure that you get the right people don't you? This is especially true when you are looking for people with specialist of professional skills. You have to be sure that they have the right skill set and the right attitude. They also must fit well with the people that they will be working with. But what about the candidate with a criminal history they want to keep quiet? Many employers don't bother with criminal background checks because it's time consuming and tedious work but they could be storing up trouble for themselves.
It's not just corporate employment where you should be careful either. What if you are commissioning some work to your house or hiring a nanny to look after your children. Don't you think that it's important to look into their background a little?
Doing background checks the traditional way might be out of the question for you because it's too time consuming to do yourself and too expensive to get someone else to do it for you. But what if it were possible to do a fast criminal background check online for an affordable small fee? Well now it is possible to do just that.
Cover yourself if you are an employer
To be certain that there are no misunderstanding between you and the applicant that might later lead to accusations of invasion of their privacy, you should get the person to sign a waiver. You will need a suitably worded form that effectively gives you permission to obtain any information that you might need about them.
Don't be tempted to skip the waiver if you are an employer. It might come back to bite you later if you do. Make sure that everyone is in agreement that anything the applicant tells you can and will be checked and that other background information may be obtained.
Performing criminal background checks
The way the court records system works is by county courts passing records up to state records offices. In that case you should only need to check state records for the areas this person has lived in or worked in to give you a good chance of finding criminal history. It would be far too much work to check everywhere.
To do a proper job you need to apply to all of the records offices in the county and states where you think that the person might lived or worked recently. Those are the most likely places that you will find this person's criminal history. Of course it depends whether he did actually live or work in those places and you won't find any records for offences tried in other states.
There may also be criminal history for this person in the federal court system. Such cases are often of the more serious in nature and it's good to check. You can do this using the U.S. Party/Case Index and PACER.
Use public records online to do a criminal background check instantly
The fastest and easiest way to do a criminal background check is to use an online public records web site. Trying to check all the county, state and federal court records one at a time is a time consuming task at best so it makes sense to start with a simple but near instant criminal background check using a site that makes it it's business to collect all these records into one place for you.
