Background Screening: Which Applicants Are Registered Sex Offenders?

Perhaps the biggest obstacles that hiring managers must remember is:

Don’t judge a book by its cover!

While it would be nice to think that all attractive, well-spoken, smartly dressed people were good and honest, that is absolutely not the case. Some of them could be hiding criminal convictions behind their bright smiles and glib answers.

This is why it is important to have a background screening process in place and run a background check on every applicant!

Currently, there are over 700,000 registered sex offenders in the United States.  Included in them are men, women, old people, young people, smart people, and attractive people.  Sex offenders are from all walks of life. It is not just the creepy old man on the corner of the street. AND sex offenders are 4 times more likely to be arrested for a second offense as other members of the general population.

How to protect your company?

1: Change your way of thinking. Play a more objective role in determining if the applicant is a criminal. Don’t disregard the need to check a person’s background because they are nice looking or seem sweet.

2. Add set hiring practices in place. Depending on the position, forge a set background screening process that EVERY applicant must agree to.

3. Be consistent. Be sure that every person who hires for you company is well-educated and aware of the policy. Establish rules and create a commitment to checking a person’s background before hiring them.

A huge help to uncovering sex offenders is the National Criminal Database Search. This criminal search that holds crimes across the country in a database of millions of records.

This search can expose the travelling criminal. In many cases, sex offenders will travel outside of their area of residence to commit their crimes. A regular county or state criminal search would not uncover these convictions, as the state or county of the conviction would not be searched.

The National Criminal Database Search may uncover these crimes, because it can pull information from places that were not targeted to search.

Another way the National Criminal Database Search helps in uncovering sex offenders is by running a social trace. This basically reports every address that is associated with that person’s social security number. So, if a person has omitted a place of residence where a crime was committed, this search could possibly uncover it.

For the sake of a safe and productive workplace, avoid big hiring mistakes by not accepting anyone at face value. Implement background screening processes that are relevant to the position sought. By screening out unfit or dishonest candidates up front, you can save your company tons of time and money.