Should Recent College Grads Care about Finding out what’s on Their Record?

Thank you to Michael Klazema for his guest post on "Should Recent College Grads Care about Finding out what’s on Their Record?"

So you just graduated from college and you’re launching headfirst into the job search, ambition burning in your belly and plenty of prospects on your mind. You fill out dozens, if not hundreds of job applications, sending in cover letters for every job that relates – even tangentially – to your major, your skill set, and your lofty aspirations. Eventually, you start getting calls to do phone interviews, or better yet, asked onto an employer’s premises to interview for your dream job in person. You nail the interview, charm the hiring manager, and think you have the inside track to landing the perfect job only weeks after starting your employment search. You hardly even think about it when the interviewer tells you that they will be running a background check on you. You’ve had no criminal offenses and your record is as pristine as it could possibly be. You have nothing to worry about from a background screening.

The above scenario is something familiar to virtually every college grad who has entered the job market recently, and almost all of the young men and women who experience this scenario have the same misguided thought process when it comes to the pre-employment background check. They figure, “I have nothing to hide” and “A background check won’t hurt me,” and while the first bit may well be true, it doesn’t always equate to the second piece being true as well.

Quite simply, many first-time job hunters assume that the two different thoughts listed above – that “they have nothing to hide” and that “a background check won’t hurt them” – are two points that go inherently hand in hand. This assumption isn’t necessarily accurate, and it can actually prove to be the one mistake that loses you your dream job even when everything else about your interview process goes off like gangbusters.

There are a few reasons that the recent college grad’s “background checks can’t hurt me” assumption is flawed. First of all, not all background checks are created equal and not all background check reports will be accurate. Most first-time job hunters assume that there is this great big centralized mainframe somewhere that contains every criminal record ever compiled. They further assume a prospective employer will simply go to this mainframe, type their name or social security number into the system, and discover that there are no results to be found.

Inaccurate Records

However, there is no central mainframe of criminal history. Instead, criminal records are scattered all over the place, from county and state police department computer systems to federal registries. A pre-employment background check procedure will seek to compile information from one, some, or all of these sources, but doing so is a convoluted process that can sometimes result in the wrong records being pulled for the wrong people.

For instance, you may have never committed a crime, but there could be somewhere out there in your county or state who shares your name and who has robbed four convenience stores at gunpoint. The more common your name is, the more likely that a pre-employment background check will pull the record of one of your less-than-wholesome name twins. Running a background check on yourself before you start going out on interviews can give you a leg up by letting you know what sort of information is being collected. If your self-check comes back clean, you should have the peace of mind to go about your job search normally. If it pulls the record of some other felon out there, though, or if your record is inexplicably showing some crime you did not commit, you will need to get on the phone with the county, state, or federal department where that file came from and work to have the issue corrected.

Identity Theft

Another common set of problem that recent college graduates might be facing are the effects of identity theft. Many college students live an environment where credit cards, driver’s licenses, and other key pieces of identification are consistently being flashed in bars or restaurants, or left lying around in dorm rooms or apartments. This environment is fertile ground for identity thieves, but many young people don’t immediately realize that someone is using their identity or decimating their credit rating.

If you have suffered from identity theft but don’t know it yet, entering into a job interview and giving a prospective employer permission to run a background check can be a grave error. At very least, your interviewer will probably see disquieting credit reports, bad news if you’re applying for a job in the financial sector. Even worse, your identity thief could have been convicted of a crime under your name, your driver’s license number, or your social security number. In other words, just because you have never committed a crime doesn’t mean there isn’t one sitting on your record and waiting to botch your otherwise perfect interview process.

Learning that you have been the victim of identity theft or that you have a few unexplained criminal charges on your should-be-spotless record is never an easy pill to swallow, but it’s best to learn about it before a job interview and on your own terms. In many cases, job hunters can actually go from one employment opportunity to another for months before realizing that their application has been being rejected due to faulty background check information. Recent college graduates who assume that they have nothing to worry about are arguably the biggest victims of this phenomenon.

The solution, quite simply, is to run a background check on yourself before you commence a job search. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how clean you think your record is. The fact is that you never know if your record is actually clean until you take a look at it by yourself. So find a respected background screening vendor and check yourself. In all likelihood, you will find that your record is as clean as you think it is. However, if you do discover something unexpected on your background check report, at least you will have the knowledge and foresight to address and fix the problem before the problem costs you a job.

About the author:

Michael Klazema has been developing products for pre-employment screening and improving online customer experiences in the background screening industry since 2009. He is the lead author and editor for Backgroundchecks.com. He lives in Dallas, TX with his family and enjoys the rich culinary histories of various old and new world countries.