As an employer or hiring manager, one of your most possible tasks when hiring a new employee is conduct a criminal background test on candidates with potentials. You do this because you believe it is the best way to protect your organization from hiring employees with major convictions on their records.
A criminal background check is one of the best references for making sound hiring decisions. However, you should also take into consideration the fact that civil convictions can also speak loudly of a job candidate’s character. It is a reason why many employers nowadays include the civil records check in their hiring process.
The Importance of Civil Records Check
Civil convictions, though not criminal in nature can result in fines, jail time or both, and they won’t show up on a criminal background check. An applicant with a clean criminal background may not be the best candidate especially if he/she has been previously proven guilty of a civil offense. To ensure that you are hiring the best candidate in terms of integrity and trustworthiness, you should include a civil background check especially on applicants vying for sensitive management level positions in your organization.
When hiring employees, you are actually replicating yourself many times over. You should hire someone who treats their responsibility the way you treat your own. They are your direct reflection. Being sure that they have a clean civil and criminal background can give you some peace of mind including an assurance that you are hiring someone who can take care of your business.
Information You’ll Get from a Civil records check?
Civil records searches are an important part of an employee screening process. This is especially applicable if you are offering a job in management or executive level. The civil records background check can contain information from federal county level courts including:
County lower courts – usually for small claims
County upper courts – for bigger civil court cases
County combined courts – information from upper and lower filings combined
Federal single district – records from a single U.S. District Court within a judicial district
As hiring manager or employer, you should know that more than 50% of applicants’ resumes contain falsehoods. It is only fair for you to conduct a civil background check on top of a criminal background check to ensure the integrity of the candidate you think is the best. It can also tell you if an applicant has been sued by a previous employer for some reason, and that’s someone you wouldn’t want to have in your organization.
Don’t be carried away by applicant resumes, charm and speaking skills, for these can be deceiving. While impressions are always present especially in the stage of evaluation, it is always good to confirm your intuitions with facts. And performing background checks would be your best bet on this.