Comprehensive Background Checks
Advanced Background Check
A comprehensive background check includes a search of all your court records and vital statistics over the course of your life, including criminal records, civil court documents, your address history, financial reports, property filings and even research on your relatives, neighbors and other associates.
You might ask yourself why anyone would need that kind of advanced background check, and the answer usually is, they don’t. That’s why most background checks aren’t that thorough or invasive, however you want to look at it. What you need to realize is that potential employers or other business associates can and will search your detailed personal background, if it’s important enough to them. For the most part, it’s a matter of how much money they want to spend, to know everything there is to know about you.
The point being, you’re not anonymous anymore. (That’s if any of us ever were.)
What you did in college could end up in a comprehensive background check. The i.p. address you use and what you said on the homepage of your favorite social networking site could end up in a comprehensive background check. Anything you say can and will be used against you, at least by people wanting to know whether they should hire you for a lucratice job.
The all-seeing eye is out there and it has many names: Google, Intellius and US Search, just to name a few. Of course, state and local criminal databases, along with the FBI criminal database, are big parts of a background search.
Luckily, it gets a little expensive to do paid lookups of everybody in your life, and only the most fastidious companies, with the most sensitive jobs to offer, are likely to dig too deep into your personal life. Sure, politicians and celebrities gets the full treatment, but they’re playing on a whole other level than you and I.
Rear Window
That’s why one of my favorite old movies is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 “Rear Window”, about Jimmy Stewart and Gracy Kelly trying to solve a murder from a New York City apartment. Stewart plays a photographer who is wheelchair-bound due to a broken leg (in a long cast), who uses his high-power camera to spy on the neighbors in the apartment complex.
You get the sense that the characters of Stewart, Kelly and their nurse, Stella, turn into a trio of voyeurs, slowly drawn into spying on their neighbors. Here’s a couple of my favorite quotes from the movie, to give a picture of what I’m talking about.
Stella: “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How’s that for a bit of homespun philosophy?”
Jeff: “Readers Digest, April 1939.”
Stella: “Well, I only quote from the best.”
Lt. Doyle: “No, and neither can you. That’s a secret private world you’re looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.”
Maybe I like Rear Window so much, because it was before its time. Who knows what kind of movie Hitchcock would make about the intrusiveness of today, with cellphone photos posted to the Internet and companies based on instant background checks.
Advanced Background Searches
Anyway, I digress. Let’s talk about what you can expect people to learn about you, when they perform a comprehensive background search on your life. Fair’s fair, this is what you can buy, to learn about other people, but we’re discussing records and backgrounds from the point-of-view of the subject of these studies, today.
- Arrest Record
- Trial Record
- Conviction Record
- Inmate Record
- Sex Offenses
- Lawsuits
- Civil Judgments
- Marriage Records
- Divorce Records
- Relatives
- Associates
- Past & Present Neighbors
- Address History
- Phone Numbers
- Liens
- Foreclosures
- Bankruptcies
- Home Value
- Property Ownership
That’s a lot of pressure, to know one screwup gets added to your life record. It’s a bit like having Santa Claus watching over your shoulder, or You-Know-Who.
This isn’t going to turn up on most basic background searches. But if you are interviewing for a job in law enforcement, in a government career, for a government contractor or for a firm where you handle money or valuables, expect that the people interviewing you have some idea about the information above.
Most important, if they ask you a question about these things, don’t lie. That’s going to compound the bad information on your report. Instead, give a short and well-considered answer explaining yourself, without appearing too defensive or appearing to dwell on the past too much. Don’t be dismissive, but don’t get into the blame game or launch into a rant.
I guess comprehensive background checks are a double-edged sword. If you do the hiring at your corporation and you need to know whether a person you’ve considered hiring is qualified and responsible for the job – or just a downright crook – background checks are a godsend. But if you’re on the receiving end of a comprehensive background check, you could be sweating things for a while.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Background Checks, Criminal Records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
We have many people looking for jobs that are concerned on what will show up on a pre employment screening background check. In many cases these applicants want to check out themselves first before completing an application incase there is any negative or false information on their record. See our web site at http://www.fullsearch.com for more information
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