The Background Check

To get a good job you’ll probably need to go through a criminal background check, a drug screen, and maybe a check of your credit and/or driver’s license.  It is a perfectly legal and extremely common practice to run background checks and/or drug screens on either all applicants, or at least on the finalist, for many, if not most jobs.  You need to be ready and to recognize that your past behavior may affect your employability.

Typically, a company requesting a criminal background check is looking for evidence of violence or theft.  If they are an organization that deals with children or youth, they are specifically looking for crimes against children.  A credit check is typically only used for those people who might be handling finance or accounting.  They want to know if you can manage your own money before they let you manage theirs.  And many jobs involve operating a motor vehicle (yours or theirs) on company business, so you need to have a valid drivers license and not have a history of multiple accidents/tickets/etc.

Unfortunately, not everyone has a perfect record.  We all make mistakes, some just bigger than others.  If you believe your background could make it hard to get a specific job, you have two good choices and one bad choice.

The first good choice is to simply not apply for jobs you know you can’t get.  If you are a registered sex-offender, don’t even try to work at a school.  Bank robbers won’t get jobs at banks.  Huge debt or multiple bankruptcies may keep you from being a CFO.  Those are pretty cut-and-dried.

The other good answer is to be up front.  Let’s say five years ago you got in fight in a bar and were convicted of aggravated assault.  Be up-front about it.  Before you give them permission to run the criminal background check, tell them what happened.  Help them to understand the situation, hopefully that was a one-time thing and what you learned from that.  Admitting that there could be things on your record is way better than the recruiter being surprised to see them there.

The bad choice is to lie, deny, and deflect.  Blaming someone else for your bad behavior or trying to explain to a recruiter how you were a victim of circumstance, or of poor law enforcement, is probably not going to help you get the job.

So, if you have things from your past that might show up on a criminal background, credit, or driver’s license check, be up front about them rather than letting the hiring manager be surprised.  Honesty really is the best policy.  If you are struggling, this might help https://im-fired.com/about-the-book/.