Hard Questions About Background Checks

I thought we had a good relationship with human resources...until the time came to implement a background check program.

By Anonymous

Page 3

Hard question #3: What are disqualifying offenses?

Most states have specific requirements detailing what felonies can result in a negative adjudication based on jobs or roles. For instance, a school-bus driver must not have been found guilty of any violent crimes or crimes that involved children. Our team, however, couldn't even agree on how much time had to pass before a felony would not disqualify a job candidate, so developing a list of disqualifying offenses was going to be really tough. To make matters worse, job descriptions had not been defined well enough to help identify disqualifying factors by role.

Hard question #4: How do you implement the program?

After we made some headway in defining potential disqualifying offenses (marked "draft," of course), reconciling the cost of the services and arguing enough to know where everyone stood on the time limit for past crimes, the big, ugly issue came up. I remember the meeting to this day.

The human resources project team wanted to cut the estimated cost of implementing the program. The dollar amount equaled the cost of background checks for the number of employees currently on staff who had access to critical assets. The manager sat back and said, "Well, of course, you don't propose running a check on our current employees, do you? We might have to move a large number of people out of their current roles."

Time to dig the holes and insert our heads into the ground.

The way I saw it, you had to check your existing staff, or the program had no value. The standards were meant for a cadre of people who had the means to be very disruptive and damaging—those people who were in the jobs already, as well as those who might be hired in the future. The risk was now, not over the next 20 years.

Time for More Research

By this point, I could see that the project was taking on water and appeared to be sinking. This time I proposed we go back to the table and draft more stringent disqualifying offenses. I argued that a simpler system would be easier to manage and execute against.

I looked around and found the response I anticipated: We need to benchmark the industry. The security team already had done that, but this time the benchmarking would be done by each executive involved.

Slowly but surely we all came back to the table with variable results relying on small sample sets. The industry had a wide field—from companies that maintained three full-time employees to conduct background investigations and manage a strict adjudication process, to companies that conduct checks with no disqualifying guidelines, to companies that did absolutely nothing.