“Are you a scarecrow?” my mother would ask, usually arching one eyebrow. The correct response was, “No Ma’am.”
The scarecrow my mother was referring to was the one in the Wizard of Oz. If you’re not familiar with that tale, let me refresh your memory.
Dorothy, a young girl living in Kansas, is picked up by a tornado and whisked away to a different place. To get home, she will have to follow the yellow brick road to Oz where the Wizard can send her home.
Dorothy makes the trip with three friends who all want something from the Wizard. There is the Cowardly Lion who wants courage. There is the Tinman who wants a heart. And there is the Scarecrow. He wants a brain.
I wish my mother was still around to ask her Scarecrow question when I read about the case of Ray Fetcho. Fetcho was a nurse, beloved by the families of the dementia patients he has cared for more than three decades.
He just lost his job because he was arrested in 1976 for a misdemeanor connected to a night club act. He has no other criminal record. Here’s how the Sun Sentinel explains the situation.
“The state has been cracking down on caregivers with criminal records since a Sun Sentinel series last fall found people with the most serious offenses — rape, child abuse, even murder — had slipped through because of flaws in Florida’s background screening system.”
I would ask the state officials: “Are you a scarecrow?”
The state is making a mistake that lots of businesses make when they use background checks and pre-employment credit checks. They don’t use their brains.
They use draw simple black and white lines and create zero tolerance policies because they don’t want to take the time and effort to think. HR blogger Jason Seiden has it right: the case of Ray Fetcho.
Use background checks. They’ll help you make better hiring decisions. But they’ll only help. You have to use your brain. You cannot be a scarecrow.