No one wants to be surprised when applying for a new job, and as such checking your criminal background in the weeks leading up to your application may be a good decision. While you know that prospective employers may look into your criminal history, you may not know exactly what the might find. After all, we have all made mistakes in the past, and when it comes to things that happened in the fairly distant past we often are not sure how such things will affect our contemporary job searches.
By keeping a few things in mind, however, you can likely feel a little more at ease – or know which offenses you will have to explain to prospective employers.
First, different items show up of different types of background checks. Therefore, if you are concerned that a prospective employer is checking your criminal background and you are worried that some things about you work or education history may not be precisely in line with what actually happened in the past, you are probably in the clear. Criminal background checks are concerned only with run-ins with the law, and are typically even more limited than that. Small traffic offenses and even some misdemeanors that you incurred as a child or very young adult often fail to make the cut for such checks.
Next, there is absolutely nothing stopping you form checking you criminal background yourself to see what sorts of things are actually showing up when employers check your history. While perhaps rare, there are circumstances in which you may have something on your criminal history that you did not even realize was there. In addition, it is possible for your name and details to be close enough to those of another individual that some of your details are mixed up through clerical errors, making you appear to have done things that someone with the same name actually did completely unbeknownst to you.
If this is this case, there are ways that you can defend your honor and repair such problems from your record. Explain to employers that your identity may be getting confused with someone else’s. Contact a background check company and ask how to get in contact with the managers of the databases which such outfits reference for their information. Checking your criminal background can provide important information that keeps you from being unfairly discriminated against and helps you fill in prospective employers with the right information
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