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. 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 […]
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 revenues and processing phony invoices.
Here’s the question for you. If you’re a small business, can you afford to lose almost $200,000?
If the answer is “No,” then start protecting yourself by improving your hiring. The Journal article includes several tips. The idea is to set up a hiring process that catches possible bad actors before you hire them.
Standardize your process. Take the same steps every time. Use the same forms. Use simple checklists to make sure you don’t miss anything.
Ask tough questions. Ask about gaps in work history. Ask about relations with the boss and co-workers. Ask about anything that might be a potential problem.
Check references. It’s amazing how many companies don’t do this.
Use background checks. The Journal puts it this way: “Preemployment checks can screen out applicants who may be unfit (or dangerous) for your workplace because of a criminal record.”
Have your attorney review your process to make sure […]
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 been arrested for DUI that they discovered that had six prior DUI charges and:
“officials learned Derizotis had been convicted of battery, false imprisonment, criminal damage and impersonating a police officer in the past.”
But wait, as the late-night pitchmen say, there’s more. According to the Farmington Daily Times, Derizotis was also “sentenced to six years in the Federal correctional Institution La Tuna in Anthony, Texas, in 1985 for bank larceny.” He was paroled in 1989, but nine months later he was arrested again for violating the terms of his parole.
How did this happen? The Farmington paper suggests that it might have been a bit of favoritism. Derizotis is the son of a former Magistrate Judge.
They may be right, but I think the real explanation is much simpler. The city never ran a criminal background check on him. They only ran those on people applying for positions that handled […]
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 way beyond the buddy who will pretend to be your old boss. This is serious stuff.
This service will let an applicant decide on what field of employment, dates, and salary they want. They will provide a fake paycheck stub and a reference letter.
If a candidate wonders about whether they can get caught using the service and perhaps fired, CareerExcuse has a simple answer: “We can’t guarantee that you wont [sic] and not liable if you do. If you get the job in the first place.we did our part. It’s up to you to act responsible after you get the job.” Grammatical mistakes left in.
So what can you do? The best defense is a rigorous, disciplined hiring process.
Review all documents carefully. Use criminal checks as part of the process. Cross-check information.
Interview thoroughly and carefully. Ask questions about job history in different ways and at different points in the interview.
Have qualified […]
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’ post.
My guess is that Dr. Bishop wasn’t subjected to any background check. She was, after all, a college professor. Maybe, the two shady events in her past wouldn’t have shown up in a background check, depending on its thoroughness. But they may have.
Some employers that use drug tests and background checks do so selectively. Front-line employees are always tested. At various levels up the chain, other employees are tested. But a line is usually drawn somewhere. Are employers really going to ask an executive to submit to a drug test or background check? Often, they do not.
Phillips’ observation and my experience match up. Companies will do a background check on people who work the loading dock or the reception desk. But, they’re less likely to do a check on applicants for key executive positions. That’s just dumb.
Executives can be criminals, too. Executives can fudge the information on their resumes. […]
To credit check or not to credit check?
The popular KnowHR blog recently ran a post that generated lots of comment from HR types. The title was A Master’s Class in Hiring a Person With Credit Wrecked By Bad Health and Being Laid Off.
The blogger shared the story of a person who’d been out of work for some time because of medical problems. Because he was out of work and had medical bills, his credit suffered. The blogger asked how other HR people would handle the use of a credit report in hiring or not hiring the person.
The discussion devolved into a question of whether or not you should use a credit check if a position is not, as once commenter put it, “cash sensitive.” But this isn’t an either/or kind of question. The real question is: “How do you use a pre-employment credit check?”
A credit check gives you straight credit information, of course. But it also gives you some data on addresses and employment. You can check that data against resume or application entries.
No matter how you use it, a credit check should never make your hiring decision for you. Use it as a starting point for questions. Use it as one of several sources of information.
In the case of the person the blogger wrote about, the claim was that the sole cause of the poor credit was the combination of job loss/medical expenses. If that’s true, then the current credit situation might not be a barrier to hiring.
But you have to keep asking questions. It […]