Lessons from Sandra Bullock
Normally, the world of screening and security has me reading reports on fraud and stupid corporate stunts. Every now and then, though, my Google Alerts throw something juicier up on my screen. That's what happened this week. A blog named MomLogic published a post by Dr. Wendy Walsh with the title, "Sandra Didn't Believe the Background Check." The supermarket tabloids could not have done better. Here are the basics of the tawdry story. When Sandra Bullock met Jesse James, her tattoo-sporting, biker husband, he was married, for the second time. His wife was pregnant. He had two children by his [...]
Scarecrows and background checks
"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. [...]
Background checks for small businesses
The Wall Street Journal has been adapting articles from their forthcoming Small Business Guidebook and publishing them in the paper and on their site. Here's a powerful paragraph from one of those articles, titled: How to Avoid Hiring a Bad Egg. Small businesses, unfortunately, are particularly vulnerable to embezzlement and other kinds of employee theft because they lack the checks and balances of big corporations. One report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that the median loss for small firms with fewer than one hundred employees was $190,000. The most common schemes? Employees fraudulently writing company checks, skimming [...]
Criminals at the court
In Farmington, New Mexico, the job description for a Court Services Coordinator (similar to a probation officer) lists the following. "Certified substance abuse counselor or five (5) years experience in the criminal justice system required." That usually means "working for a criminal justice agency" not "as a criminal being processed by the system." But, it turned out that Court Services Coordinator Christos Derizotis had lots of experience in the criminal justice system that the city didn't know about. According to an article in DUI Attorney headlined "City official fired over New Mexico DWI arrest," it was only after Derizotis had [...]
Faked references for a fee
The American entrepreneur and department store executive, John Wannamaker, once said that "Half of all the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." Sounds to me like what you face with resumes these days. You know there may be falsehoods mixed in amongst the truth. But it's hard to tell which is which. It just got harder. In an article advising job seekers on truthful strategies for dealing with problem references and resume gaps, CNN discusses web sites that will fake your references for a price. They identify one such site, CareerExcuse.com. This goes [...]
The case of Amy Bishop
John Phillips is one of the country's leading experts on employment law. The good news for us is that he writes an excellent blog, The Word on Employment Law. There, he puts what he knows into terms that non-lawyer HR people and real-life managers can understand and use. His February 16, 2010 post, "Alabama Shooting and Background Checks," is a good example of his work. Biology professor, Amy Bishop, of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, is facing murder charges after killing three staff members and injuring three others on February 12, 2010. Here are two key paragraphs from Phillips' [...]