How bad is it?
Hiring managers are forever complaining that the quality of candidates simply isn’t what it used to be. When it comes to the information in a criminal background check or driving record check, they just might be right.
Kroll Inc. is a private investigation firm. They also study topics such as background screening, forensic accounting, bodyguard services, corporate restructuring, and technology services. They just released a study of employment screening “hit ratios” for 2006. Hits are nothing more than the percentage of searches in a specific area that turn up something. For example, if you conduct a criminal records search as part of your background investigation of a prospective employee and turn up a criminal conviction, that would be a hit.
Here’s the scary part. Just about every category had more hits in 2006 than the year before.
Hits on criminal records checks increased from 8.5 percent of searches to 9.1 percent. That means that almost ten percent of the people applying to you for a job are likely to have a criminal past.
This varies a bit from industry to industry. Two of the highest hit rates on criminal checks are in construction and retail.
The hit rate is lower in financial services, healthcare, and education. But that’s small comfort since those are industries where hiring a criminal can have the biggest impact.
Checks on driving record searches reveal that almost half of all applicants for constructions jobs have some mark on their driving record. You certainly want to know that before you put them in the operator’s seat of expensive machinery.