Kansas City Star<\/a> business columnist Diane Stafford takes up that issue in her recent column titled: Credit checks a legal part of pre-employment investigations Her bottom line is that “credit checks are a legal and in some cases appropriate part of pre-employment investigations. And there’s only a glimmer of a chance that credit checks might be considered discriminatory.”<\/p>\nIn most cases, you won’t decide not to hire a person based on their credit history per se. You’ll make the decision based on fitness for a particular job or because the credit check points to other issues.<\/p>\n
Obviously a person’s credit history has a greater bearing on your decision to hire for specific positions. You’ll pay more attention to it in cases where people will have access to money or where judgment is a factor. You’ll pay less attention if you’re hiring a receptionist.<\/p>\n
But in both cases, you want to use the credit history as an indicator of areas to check further, not as a simple black and white hiring choice. Some reasons for doing a pre-employment credit check have nothing to do with credit.<\/p>\n
The information on a pre-employment credit check gives you an independent source of information on the job history that you can compare with what’s on a resume or application. If things don’t match up, investigate further.<\/p>\n
One more thing. Make sure you apply the same tests and checks to everyone seeking the same position. That’s one reason why running a criminal background check and a pre-employment credit check on all potential hires is a good idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes you hear people complain about the use of pre-employment credit checks as part of the hiring process. They say, “My bad credit shouldn’t be an issue in whether I can do the job. I’m being discriminated against.” Are they right? Kansas City Star business columnist Diane Stafford takes up that issue in her recent column titled: Credit checks a legal part of pre-employment investigations Her bottom line is that “credit checks are a legal and in some cases appropriate part of pre-employment investigations. And there’s only a glimmer of a chance that credit checks might be considered discriminatory.” In most cases, you won’t decide not to hire a person based on their credit history per se. You’ll make the decision based on fitness for a particular job or because the credit check points to other issues. Obviously a person’s credit history has a greater bearing on your decision to hire for specific positions. You’ll pay more attention to it in cases where people will have access to money or where judgment is a factor. You’ll pay less attention if you’re hiring a receptionist. But in both cases, you want to use the credit history as an indicator of areas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-credit-checks","category-employment-screening"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":706,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions\/706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}