This kind of company deserves to die, and the public record laws for highly personal data also. The obsession with "background checks" is a really huge part of why the US has extremely high recidivism rate.
When people can't find a job even flipping burgers or distributing newspapers, they have no choice other than to go back to the criminal life.
edit: as I got private feedback: it is not my intention to disrespect people flipping burgers or doing other "low level" jobs. My post was meant to illustrate that these two jobs usually do not require education and especially not a "background check", so it is entirely pointless to do these (or to not hire people with a... shady past).
A few people I've known with criminal histories only managed to turn their lives around by scraping a business together for themselves, going into home contracting (handyman, exterminator, etc.). They had done time for stuff like narcotics trafficking and manslaughter and were never going to be hired by any employer otherwise.
Then, in the vein of technological progress, services started popping up encouraging potential clients to do background checks on contractors. You wouldn't want to let a former criminal into your home to do repairs, after all.
> Then, in the vein of technological progress, services started popping up encouraging potential clients to do background checks on contractors. You wouldn't want to let a former criminal into your home to do repairs, after all.
How in f..ks name is this even legal, to begin with?
At some point some enterprising youts figured out how to scrape public records databases and re-sell the information. It's hardly illegal.
It only got into illegal(ish) territory when they started gaming SEO to shame individuals with criminal records (so your mugshot was the first thing that came up on searches), charging money to de-prioritize those results, and not necessarily following through.
I 95% agree with you. We have a huge problem in the US with recidivism and once someone has paid their debt to society, their past shouldn't be held against them.
However, Checkr is the result of a strong demand for this type of service, not the cause of it. If Checkr didn't exist then companies would use someone else to conduct their background checks.
Sadly, I don't think we'll see a change in this mentality & practice until there is legislation against it. Background checks are just too easy of a way to filter applicants (from an effort perspective), especially for minimum-wage/high turnover jobs.
Also, just to play devil's advocate - would you get into an Uber if you knew the driver had 5 previous DUIs? What happens if/when this person drives drunk again and kills a passenger or a pedestrian?
The ethical decision becomes more nuanced, Uber has a responsibility to do everything it can to ensure the safety of its passengers. You have to draw a line somewhere.
> would you get into an Uber if you knew the driver had 5 previous DUIs?
Well they somehow convinced the state they should have a driver's license still. If they're that dangerous they shouldn't be on the road.
Further, simply having 5 DUIs on record is itself not a sufficient data point to determine if there is any increased risk today of that person doing so again. For instance, if a person turned to drinking out of grief at one point in their life but has had many stable years since, how would you identify that risk against the risk of someone who hasn't yet lived through such a situation but were it to occur they would drink to excess and make poor decisions too?
NOTE:
I'm not saying those DUIs aren't a problem, I'm just pointing out that it can be more complicated than it first appears to reach an internally consistent, much less fair, approach.
> just to play devil's advocate - would you get into an Uber if you knew the driver had 5 previous DUIs?
See, this is the very problem with using criminal history as a form of profiling.
What about his history indicates that he drinks on the job, or will be drunk when you get into his car? If those DUIs all occurred off-the-clock, involving no passengers or collisions, after long shifts of driving stone sober, what's it to Uber?
The irony is, if we deny him employment opportunities based on past behavior unrelated to his job performance, he's going to have plenty of free time to indulge such vices. Being unemployed sucks.
Meanwhile take a 20-something with a habit of getting high behind the wheel. He's still young so he's got a clean record and few (if any) reviews. You'd get into his deathmobile simply because you don't know any better.
Point is, there are lots of options as an employer. Might as well pick the one without a criminal record, all else being equal. And just imagine the lawsuit when someone sues you because of an accident and you hired the driver even though he had 5 DUIs.
Why would you get into a car with that driver? Out of the total population of licensed drivers in the United States[1], about 1% have DWI in any given year and the recidivism rate is upwards of 20% depending on the state[2][3]. Given available statistics about the relationship between alcohol consumption and likelihood of a vehicular accident[4], there's good evidence that you're increasing your risk of being in an accident by at least 60% if you get into a car with someone who has had a DWI.
Further, considering recidivism can only be tracked if people are caught and the legal limit is 0.08 BAC, a good argument can be made that an Uber driver with a past DWI would be more likely than can be predicted to have be driving under the influence again (meanwhile a BAC of 0.05 still increases the risk of an accident by approximately 100%).
To be fair, the CEO of Checkr advocates strongly that a service like Checkr is one way to combat this exact problem.
Traditional background checks are very blunt tools, where decisions are very binary. If an individual is a felon, there is typically zero room for negotiation. This is often the case even with just a misdemeanor. There is usually very little trusted, low cost, easily accessed data, which can balance out or provide a more nuanced view. A service like Checkr is able to provide a much more comprehensive picture, with more depth and nuance, so that employers can be more discerning and less binary.
Also, it's not as if applications don't already specifically ask for information on criminal record. The standard is that employer has this information, without doing any actual background checks. I imagine a comprehensive background checking service would mostly serve to incentivize an employer to hire a subset of previously convicted individuals that they otherwise wouldn't have, and not the other way around.
I work with hospitals and receive access to incredibly private information, as well as access to and knowledge of pharmacy data for highly controlled substances. Some of the hospitals I work with are research institutions, whose researchers are subject to death threats on a regular basis.
I find it perfectly reasonable that they would want a third-party verification of my legal history, drug use, and financial situation.
I used to work for a video streaming site. They did background checks as a blanket policy for all employees. Personally, I disagree with that position. However, the team I worked for ran the subscriber management system, meaning we basically “ran the till”. For something like that, I think a credit monitoring service is appropriate. But for the rest of the team? It’s a waste and intrusive, and, as others point out, makes it hard for people with a record to reintegrate into society.
I don’t agree with blanket policies. Policies should be tailored to risks associated with the situation. Some jobs need it, most don’t.
I used Checkr once for screening an employee and had a terrible experience. After two weeks, the check was still pending as they had to do some sort of manual process with the courts in Los Angeles to complete it. I didn't find their service useful because of the delays and was promised many times that the report would be done shortly. Eventually I gave up and went to another service. I asked for a refund after about two weeks and was told NO, because the check had already been initiated. I don't think it's an acceptable SLA (two weeks or more) for a background check - most services turn these around in a couple of days.
They're all pretty worthless. Checkr couldn't verify almost ANYTHING about my background. HireRight called my CURRENT employer for a job I had 8 years ago, said "unable to verify dates", then when I pointed out the obvious problem (they verified the exact dates of my current employment down to actual start date), they just closed the whole process with 'unable to verify'. Of course, none of it mattered, because the employers don't expect them to do a good job anyway, so they hire you regardless. But god forbid you actually have something in your background that needs research/explaining.
It's quite sad that we (collectively) consider this "lucking out" - I don't want to assume your friends situations, but our collective consciousness leaves a permanent mark on their life for past mistakes.
And checkr is even more help in the saturated background check industry.
Is this company revenue tied to the amount of denials they do, as in, they charge per check and if the hire is made they stop making money? Halon's razor and all.
Checkr is minting money. I doubt they needed this cash infusion, but it could make sense to drive even more growth.
Almost all of the on-demand companies (Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc.) use the service to screen independent contractors. The kicker is that independent contractors often sign up for many of these services, so Checkr can turn around and sell the same data that they pull for 1 individual to 3+ companies at ~$15+ a pop.
"I doubt they needed this cash infusion, but it could make sense to drive even more growth."
I doubt that's the case. If it is, then their management just made a huge mistake. Raising money always has a cost attached. Raise enough money and your exit strategy becomes very constrained -- i.e. fewer companies have the capital to acquire a company with higher valuations. Eventually IPO becomes your only option. Your investors would also expect you to generate a good ROI on the money they gave you. Unless the terms are ridiculously good, you shouldn't raise money willy-nilly.
Checkr doesn't seem like a company that requires insane growth. There's no network effect to exploit. I doubt each additional customer or each additional background record improves their business on an unit by unit basis.
It's a smart business move to get investors on-board who are also investors in the company's potential clients. The obvious benefit being that they can push/suggest that management use your product, the less obvious benefit is they are less likely to start a competing business.
Depending on regulations of this, I doubt they can resell. Especially if each background check is done days apart from each other. You may run into a scenario where a felony case was recorded in between background checks.
I'd love if they could re-use data to temporary supplement checks that take a long time. Some background checks can take _ages_ for certain counties, especially if they were a city/county employee, a police officer, or lived in some rural county that only does background checks via paper or fax and their city office is only open 10am to 3pm two days per week.
If Checkr could tell me immediately, "We submitted the requests, but they may take a long time, so here's Bob's clear background check as of 2 years ago while you wait."
(I've had a few background checks via Checkr take many weeks or more, meanwhile the employee is left in limbo. 98% were quick, but those 2% were painful; not Checkr's fault of course.)
Here's the process to find criminal records in San Francisco:
1) Walk into the courthouse
2) Go find which binder has the first letter of the last name of the applicant
3) Flip through the dot-matrix printed green/white reams of printed papers to see if someone with a first and last name has a court record
4) Write down the case number on a form with a bunch of other info
5) Go wait in line and hand it to the clerk
6a) If it's a record they have, you can go into the back and view it with a clerk watching to make sure you don't steal or adulterate the record. It's the only copy.
6b) If it's not in the courthouse, they'll tell you to come back in a few days while they pull it from the archive.
7) If you had many records to pull, some courts will restrict you to a max of 1-2 per day. So you either have to send lots of people, or just wait. Some courts like Santa Barbra can take 120+ days.
This is true for lots of counties in the US, and it takes getting involved in local politics to fix it. A lot of Americans can't make rent if they don't get their next paycheck, and a long background check can be really stressful.
It's a hard problem, but it's getting better. I could go on :)
Fair point. I can't speak to the regulations or ethics here. But in practice, with the number of ICs being activated daily, I doubt a low-level employee at an on-demand startup really cares or notices if the background check was run today vs. last week vs. last month.
Even if it has to re-submit each time, given the volume of reports Checkr runs, it could negotiate such that the marginal cost of running a report decreases each time it is run for a given individual.
Armchairing but it seems likely that some of the data can be reused, for example historical data like maybe country of origin, residential addresses, etc.
I find it quite scary that whether you can get employed or not is decided on the whim of some company.
What if your record is wrong, and they won't fix it? And what value do you get of the screening? What can you find, that really would matter to a hiring decision, other than extreme cases?
What if they dig up dirt on someone with the same or similar name? My mom can't give blood because of some guy with a name that is one letter different than hers. You'd think a different gender would make it easy to fix - but no, she finally gave up.
I got served a court summons for someone who shares my name that was being sued for not paying 100k in medical debt to MY WORK. it was super embarrassing and they walked in and threw papers at me.
It took me months to get it figured out because the people responsible for serving me just ignored me. They refused to believe they made a pretty massive research mistake. We had different middle names and birth dates.
Either way this would be a PITA, but it seems the easiest thing to do would be to just go ahead and show up in court. The judge would have you there for about 2 minutes before smacking down the lawyer for the side that summoned you, and sent you home. No reason to spend months working it all out...
I had to very recently correct my credit report because their happened to be another guy with my same name in another state. it didn't take long but was annoying. I also get a lot of that guys emails, he must have a similar gmail address to mine. super annoying. Sadly his insurance provider leaked a lot of his PII data to me through email. Which is probably still archived on gmail.
Yes. I talked to them about an adjacent vertical but they were super focused on the potential employees/contractors market. (This was about a year ago, so maybe they've changed their focus a bit.)
The demo on the website is pretty interesting, especially with the amount of information they can get. The "previous salary" was pretty interesting - is that something that companies actually check?
Also, is there a risk of abusing this? What information does Checkr need to run a report, and how do they verify that the person they are running the report on is actually applying for the relevant position?
This is a horrific thought to go into a job interview with one salary point in mind while the employer knows in the back of their mind what you got paid at each previous job.
Particularly if you took equity at a startup at lower salary - guaranteeing they don't account for that.
They try to get salary, but often don’t get it. I’ve been asked for salary info on former employees. Equifax also owns a company called theworknumber, which your employer voluntarily provides with salary information.
The standard language in background checks gives them permission to obtain it through any means, including asking your bank how much your direct deposit is, or asking your credit card company what your stated income was. I haven’t heard of anyone attempting to use those means, but technically they could.
> Equifax also owns a company called theworknumber, which your employer voluntarily provides with salary information.
For clarification, this is a give-and-take situation and only applicable if your employer subscribes to this service. If they want to request salary history for new hires, they need to provide salary history for old ones.
Most small businesses don't, but if you contract through a staffing agency, those do.
>Unless directed by our clients, we do not share employee information provided by our clients with third parties. When directed by our clients, we communicate company employee information to third party service providers such as payroll service bureaus, insurance companies and third party administrators, among others.
According to that, they'll only do it if directed by your employer.
I used to work in the background screening company before switching careers. The background screening process is very tedious, each state and sometimes counties keep records in their own way. If you are lucky, you can easily just search for the person’s case online, however many times they only allow case searches over the phone. I’m wondering how Checkr handles that since it’s not an easy thing to scale. Even looking at their careers page, they are not even hiring any data entry folks to handle that.
I work in education with children and background checks in PA is as follows.
1) State Child Line background check (Mail in a form $15)
2) State Police Background check (Online Access $20 I get this back immediately)
3) FBI Finger Prints (UPS Store $50)
So frustrating that we don't have a national registry with state police and national agencies. I Don't have to do the finger prints as much but the other clearances are every three years.
The issue for driving is I have to get my driving record. Some agencies ask for multiple of years so this could mean multiple of states and many states have outsourced the work.
Maybe now they can buy a vowel. I say this only half as a joke. I recently had to use checkr. The first thing they ask you for is your social security number. Typing your social into a box below a misspelled URL isn't a super comforting experience
Do you consider Flickr to be "misspelled"? Would you trust Chick-fil-A to serve you food? Maybe the real reason Toys"R"Us went belly-up is because they couldn't afford vowels either.
This is a pretty divisive issue with regards to recidivism and personal rights. As I see it:
For employers:
- They are looking out for their own asses. That's the reason why these background check companies exist in the first place. If there wasn't a liability that could potentially fall on the business from someone they hired, then this industry wouldn't be as big as it is.
- If everything was 100% transparent in the hiring process, there would probably be way more criticism from lots of other things. Prior crime convictions aside, there's many reasons a candidate might be arbitrarily overlooked. Maybe the business searched for their social media accounts and didn't like what they saw. Maybe the person is ugly. Maybe the hiring manager has a negative opinion about their education history or what part of town they live in. Who knows. If they know what the laws are, they can also figure out how to get around them while still seeming compliant.
- They do not give a shit about giving someone a second chance. They are not Make a Wish and thinking they are doing a solid to someone out of prison trying to get back on their feet. I would believe it if most applications submitted with the "prior criminal convictions" box checked are automatically filtered out of the applicant pool. The potential risk is just not worth the reward for the employers, which is why they choose to use services like checkr.
- If the employer does keep applicants with prior convictions, they are probably going to lowball the candidate to hire them at a discount for the position, knowing the candidate has slim options with little leverage.
- I don't see small businesses (outside of ones working with children, the government, or similar such instances) using a background check service as much as larger corporations that make lots of hires. The cost of multiple candidate background checks mounts quickly, so the business will likely only a background check on 1-2 people at most, probably after multiple interviews and at least 1 in-person communication.
For employees/candidates:
- It's like a shitty butterfly effect, where a mistake you paid for continually rains on your parade the rest of your life. There are no "fresh starts".
- Knowing that most employers will throw your application in the trash if you have a criminal record, therefore limiting your own chances to try to improve yourself and be a contributing member of society, there is basically an incentive to lie on the application for the sake of just hoping the business won't find out. Essentially, by lying you reason to yourself you have more to gain than to lose. (Aside: Perhaps this is not the best kind of behavior to enforce for a person that just had to reconcile with their shitty behavior in prison).
- Can we trust the companies behind the background checks? Their incentive is to profit, so they are not looking out for the people their services impact as much as the services their customers are buying.
- How can peoples' rights to privacy and confidentiality be restored? This requires a lot of discussion and legislation to make a meaningful impact. These background check companies will not go down without putting up a lobbying fight.
First, that's completely the wrong framing. Maybe checkr doesn't "care enough" about the people who have been punished, but it's not like the company exists out of spite. It exists to serve the legitimate business interests of people who are scared of the impact that a person with a prior record of doing bad things may have on their business, if hired. (Including: our customers are in enterprise/gov/edu and require us to commit to background checks on everyone we hire).
Secondly:
I don't understand all the hatred here. Who, exactly, is this going to prevent from getting a job? People who were honest in their application when asked about prior convictions/etc, or people who lied?
Why should businesses be forced to hire people who lie about past misdeeds? There's a perfectly reasonable way for people who have done bad things, and been "PUNISHED BY THE COURT SYSTEM") to handle it: you tell the employer "x years ago I was convicted of X bad thing. I was guilty, but I learned from the experience and changed. Here are three character references who have known me both before and after, and I'm happy to tell you more about this if you want to know".
If you are honest in your application, a background check will only corroborate your truthfulness. And if you're not, why should we as a society object to someone taking that into account when considering whether to trust you?
I think the problem is the "bad" things I may or may not have done in the past is none of the potential employers business.
The problem though isn't that liars are getting jobs but also the honest people. Valuable skills are overlooked because a past mistake has sullied their appearance.
>I think the problem is the "bad" things I may or may not have done in the past is none of the potential employers business.
But that's simply not true. Peoples' past behavior has a predictive value over their probable future behavior and we all know this, and it applies in positive directions as well as negative. I mean, this is why we ask about "experience": because we think that if you did X competently in the past, you are more likely to be able to do X competently in the future.
This predictive power is not perfect, of course, but it's silly to claim that it's "none of the bank's business that I stole $1M from the last bank I worked at", or "none of the kindergarten's business that I previously molested 15 children".
People who get turned down for jobs because they did bad things years ago (1) didn't have to have done those things, and (2) have ample opportunity to demonstrate that they have improved/moved on/"are a different person now"/etc. Companies may lose out by failing to hire some of the best of that group, but it's not insane or evil for companies as a group to be hesitant.
> I think the problem is the "bad" things I may or may not have done in the past is none of the potential employers business.
Baloney - if I'm going to trust you with my customers, my business data, and my reputation, I darned well do deserve to know if you've done things that might make you undeserving of that trust. Lying on a job application would be a very good example of that.
There in lies part of the problem. It is not as simple as you make it sound. While I 100% agree with you that honesty upfront is the absolute best approach, the problem is that 9 out of 10 times employers simply scan applications, see a check for conviction/arrest history, with or without notes explaining the circumstances, and discard the application. So while the applicant may have taken the best approach, it often doesn't work out for them.
The real problem with background checks is that there is loose regulation around them. Often times these companies return inaccurate or incomplete results. Often times they provide reports that are not in compliance with FCRA. An even bigger problem is that a background report provides absolutely no context to a crime. They also make it difficult at best to dispute any mistakes. This is a huge problem.
GoodHire (a Checkr competitor) are working to change this somewhat. They allow individuals to add notes and context to their own background reports. This can be done individually (the person pays for their own report and adds the notes) or after a background check is provided by a company.
It is not necessarily about paying to "clear allegations" against them, it is about adding context to convictions/arrests listed their background report.
For example, someone may add this to a drug conviction listed on their report: "I was 18, a freshman in college, and away from home for the first time. I was at a party where drugs were consumed and I was subsequently arrested for possession. Since that time I have obtained my college degree and maintained an active, drug free, lifestyle. I learned my lesson, changed my life and drugs are no longer a part of my lifestyle."
If the receive a copy of their report due to an adverse action by an employer there is no charge to add the statement. I do agree, however, that, like a credit report, background reports should be free to obtain at least once a year. There are countless cases of mistaken identity and incorrect information on criminal background reports that are often found out after it is too late. Often times too, many arrests/convictions can be removed from your report depending on the type, state, and age of arrest/conviction. Many college students don't realize the long-term repercussions of simple indiscretions. It is only after they apply for a job and are turned down because of a background check that they realize the beer they were caught drinking at age 20 in their college dorm room had bigger consequences than the $50 fine.
Why? Verifying the veracity of information on a job application with public records seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and nowhere in the realm of 'civil rights abuse'.
I've personally witnessed background checks used to catch people who flat-out lied in the hiring process.
You're absolutely right. Those people had already been punished by the courts for their misdeeds against society. They were not going to suffer further at our hands.
When they chose to lie to us during the hiring process, however, they committed a new misdeed that some might say justified additional reaction.
To clarify a point on which there may be some doubt, the hiring process spelled out in quite certain terms that were in no way, shape, form, or manner less than completely clear that a criminal history was not an bar to employment. These were not empty words. The people clearly did not believe this, and made their own personal, individual choices to be dishonest with us.
I absolutely understand how this was a fault in the hiring process. The hiring process of the company should have been much more patient for background check results. That way we would have caught that we were being lied to earlier. The nature of the roles in question - and the access to private and sensitive material involved - required us to care about the pasts of the candidates.
Is it possible that you consider the flaw in the process to be of a different nature? Such as that there should under no circumstances be any interest in a person's criminal history in any hiring process?
>Is it possible that you consider the flaw in the process to be of a different nature? Such as that there should under no circumstances be any interest in a person's criminal history in any hiring process?
Yes. If, as you say, criminal history was not a bar to employment, why ask the question at all if you are going to run a background check anyhow? You contradict yourself by stating that "criminal history was not an bar to employment" but also that "The nature of the roles in question [...] required us to care about the pasts of the candidates." so it's difficult to understand why you are so firm on this point. Anyhow, there are plenty of protected groups of people that a prospective employer can't legally discriminate against, yet the discrimination still happens.
The applicant has to take a calculated risk when deciding whether to answer the question about criminal history honestly. Maybe a better question on the application, rather than asking outright about criminal history and discarding an applicant when you catch them in a lie, is asking about relevant convictions that might have some implications about whether that person has a history of violations in your area of practice, or present a conflict to your customers.
> You contradict yourself by stating that "criminal history was not an bar to employment" but also that "The nature of the roles in question [...] required us to care about the pasts of the candidates."
I understand why you feel that way. Your heart is in the right place, and you care deeply about those suffering at the hands of a heartless society. Your blossoming of pure compassion is wonderful!
Yet, it's possible that you have not caught me in a contradiction. We would not have cared about, say, a past conviction for handling marijuana or anything vehicle related. We might have cared about a recent conviction for fraud. Honesty was paramount for that position, and choosing to lie to us was definitely a bar.
You're absolutely right that the applicant took a calculated risk and opted to lie. And we took a calculated risk by trusting their initial response. After that, we were much more cautious about waiting for background-check results.
I understand why you believe the question as you phrased it is better. It defers to the candidate's judgment and allows them to offer only the narrow bits of information that they think could be relevant. It maximizes their discretion and minimizes the risk of being discriminated against for a history that's over. It is, however, just possible that some might prefer to allow candidates the opportunity to be forthright, honest, and transparent?
We would not have cared about, say, a past conviction for handling marijuana or anything vehicle related. We might have cared about a recent conviction for fraud. Honesty was paramount for that position, and choosing to lie to us was definitely a bar.
Why? From the company's perspective it makes sense to ask if an applicant has a criminal record. Statistically someone with a prior conviction is much more likely to commit a future crime
What's sad is that in each of the cases I have encountered, the convictions that were concealed would not have been issues. It was the lying about them that did it.
When people can't find a job even flipping burgers or distributing newspapers, they have no choice other than to go back to the criminal life.
edit: as I got private feedback: it is not my intention to disrespect people flipping burgers or doing other "low level" jobs. My post was meant to illustrate that these two jobs usually do not require education and especially not a "background check", so it is entirely pointless to do these (or to not hire people with a... shady past).