Another Way to Look At it – The Today Show Convicts Background Check Companies

Another Way to Look At it – The Today Show Convicts Background Check Companies

NBC’s Today Show aired an “Investigative Report” on November 9, 2012 about inaccurate background checks and the damage they are doing to job applicants. I use quotation marks because I watch a lot of detective shows on television and I know a set up when I see one. You’ve seen them too – when the prosecution has already decided who is guilty even though there are plenty of other suspects from whom to choose. Perhaps you saw the report. If not, there is a link at the bottom of the page so you can check it out. But I’m not here to quibble about how the story was told. Factually, it was accurate. My issue is it only presented one side of the story, a story to which there is many sides.

Now that the election is over, we can all return to doing our jobs. Uncertain as our world still is, some things remain unchanged. Employers need people and people need jobs. Even if you have one employee or, more critically, if you have 1000 employees, hiring new people and introducing them into your workplace remains one of the riskiest things your company does. The law requires you to do what’s “reasonable” to mitigate that risk and failing to do so creates some unreasonable exposure.

Background checks are but one thing you can do to reduce your risk. Today made a point of showing everyone what can go wrong for people when the process is poorly conducted and there is nothing wrong with that. What our industry does has the potential to affect peoples’ lives, and not just applicants’ lives, and it should be taken seriously.

The ripple effect of putting the wrong person into the workplace is potentially catastrophic. Workplace homicides are trending down but still account for more than 10% of all on-the-job fatalities. Assault, harassment, theft – you name it – it’s all happening at America’s jobsites. The method most accessible to employers for identifying potential threats is the background check. You can do it any number of ways but logic and practical business sense say you have to do something.

Because what happens if you don’t? When someone gets hurt at your company or, worse, lives are lost, the lawyers come running. “Did you do your due diligence?” “What did you do?” “Why did you do that but not this?” Perhaps you did what was “reasonable” or maybe not. Either way, your company is damaged and, most likely, will never be the same again. Everyone at the company will be impacted i.e. disruption in business, post traumatic stress disorder, etc. Today should do an investigative report about that. But I digress.

Here’s my point: Employers and Applicants want this done quickly and their metric is minutes/hours instead of days. Applicants who are denied employment complain – sometimes loudly. Politicians, never shy about righting a perceived wrong (particularly when it involves a TV camera) pass legislation to restrict access to data so it is now even more difficult to distinguish one Catherine Taylor (one of the victims in the Today story) from another. It is the perfect storm.

I couldn’t help myself. I posted a reply to NBC’s story and I’m almost certain Matt Lauer read it. I said many of things I said in the previous paragraphs. I also said that everyone should re-calibrate their expectations. For example:

• Everyone involved needs to understand this is a process that will never have the word “perfect” used to describe it. The best you can expect is 99%+/- accuracy. Not bad but not perfect. Ain’t gonna happen because there are just too many variables.
• Employers need to understand that fast doesn’t equal accurate and, maybe (just maybe), the applicant who can’t wait 2-3 days for you to check them out might not be the best person for your company.
• Applicants need to accept the fact that if your name is John Smith or your culture’s equivalent, there is probably someone else out there with your date of birth; so it is highly likely you two will be confused for one another at some point.
• Pre-employment screening companies need to understand that if they continue to deliver unfiltered data under the guise of a “background check”, eventually it will be not only their demise but perhaps our industry’s. By the way, if people weren’t buying these products, they wouldn’t be available.

The solution to this problem isn’t easy – there are too many moving parts. One way would be to fingerprint everyone and then make that information available to employers. That will never happen because of privacy and civil liberty concerns. For now, the best for which we can hope is for employers to stop using unfiltered data and for background check companies to adhere to the current FCRA and EEOC rules. Finally, it would really help if people became more involved with their personal data like they are starting to do with their credit histories. Perhaps Today will do a segment on that. I’m not holding my breath. It’s more likely, as ESR’s Les Rosen suggested, their next report will be about employees who are injured on the job by co-workers who wouldn’t have been hired if the employers had done a better background check.

Today Show link:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/49505767/ns/today-today_rossen_reports/t/rossen-reports-background-check-firms-making-errors/