A background check could have helped you get that job

April 29, 2014 - PRLog -- Most of us have been in the situation where you are applying for jobs and everything is going great. First, you nailed the phone interview are asked to come in for a personal interview. Then that interview goes well and you are positive that the job will be yours. After the interview, human resources tell you that they need to conduct a background check on you.  No problem, right? You have kept yourself out of trouble; well, at least as much as possible. So you give them your information and now you know you have the job.  It’s all just technicalities at this point.

Four days have gone by and you’ve been waiting and waiting.  You tell yourself that they just have a couple more interviews to go through. Your confidence is still high. A week has passed and you send your interviewers an email thanking them, hoping to receive a reply. Nothing happens and you are now going over the entire interview in your head wondering where it went wrong. Finally, you decide to call human resources to inquire about the position and are told that they decided to with someone else.

How can this happen? You did everything right.  You were 100% positive the job was yours. How? How could this happen? Where did it go wrong?

Did you conduct a personal background check? No? That could be the main reason you did not receive that great job. Many people go into interviews not knowing what is reported about them when a company does a background check. There could be many things that show up in a background search that can hurt your chances for a job.

Reason 1:

False information – The information reported on your background check is collected from many different counties, state and federal databases. Most companies will do just a criminal background check (https://eknowid.com/Pages/GetStarted_UncoverBackground.aspx) at county and state level. When the search is conducted, usually a name and address search is done (depending on what the company pays the service provider) and a report is given back with the results. The results could have other people listed with the same name as yours or the person processing the background check misspelled or inserted your name wrong. Either way, it will result in a bad report especially if there’s another person out there with your same name that has a record not as clean as yours.

Reason 2:

Old Information – Okay, everyone is not perfect and from time to time, get in trouble. We are not talking murder but some little misdemeanors. I mean a driving ticket is technically a misdemeanor. However, these will show up on a criminal check. Most background checks can only go back for 7 years (check with your local state laws, though they do vary). You can, depending on state, have some of your youth experiences expunged or sealed so that they do not show up on your record or just know what is showing up so that you don’t give out any false information during the hiring process. If you listed that you do not have any criminal records and something shows up, it could mean that your application ends up in the ole “file for later” file.

If you do your own a personal background check (https://eknowid.com) you will spot these problems before going into those interviews and have a chance to correct them before human resource spots them.

So many companies offer this, which one do I choose?

If you Google “Personal Background Checks” there are thousands of companies offering this service and picking the right one is very important as well.

Free – These are the sites that you should stay away from. The searches they offer are very minimal and give you little information leading you to believe that there is nothing to worry about. I guarantee you that the companies you are applying to are paying to have their background check vendor dig deeper into your information.  These “Free” sites will show you little information and if need it to say more then it will cost you money. Just remember you get what you pay for.

Subscriptions – Why would you need to buy a subscription for a personal background search? Really, how many times a year are you going to run a search on yourself?

At eKnowID (https://eknowid.com/), we do not offer free checks or ask for a subscription. We want you to know what is being reported on you. We cannot offer this for free because we do have people that will double check your report and make sure it is accurate and if an issue arises, they will pinpoint it out for you as well. We do understand that you are looking for a job so money is tight. That is why we try to keep our cost as low as possible; some checks are as low as $12.95. See, it is not that expensive and will show you the same information that a company will see (at a fraction of the cost).