Nina Kaufman, who writes the “Make It Legal” blog for Entrepreneur filed a post titled “Conducting Background Checks.” The blog provides information on legal matters for small businesses. Most of the advice is pretty straightforward. If you read this blog regularly, you know that we frequently offer advice like the following on background checks.
. . . they can form an important facet of your due diligence for your small business. It’s not just about criminal matters, although that’s a part of it. For example, if you intend to hire an employee to handle sensitive financial matters, you’d want to know whether they have a previous conviction for kiting checks. If you want to enter into a strategic alliance with another company, you’ll want to know whether it has undergone a bankruptcy restructuring in recent years.
Kaufman points out that there are laws that govern background checks, though she doesn’t provide much detail. You’ll find more in our post “Understanding FCRA rules for employment screening.”
The big news here is not the content of the blog post. The big news is who’s doing the blog post.
Years ago you probably didn’t think a small business needed to conduct background checks. That’s changed. Years ago it cost a lot in both money and time to conduct pre-employment background and credit checks. Now it’s easy and inexpensive.
Large business or small, today you should make background checks a regular part of your hiring process. Even Entrepreneur says so.