Frequently asked questions

Pre-employment screening is not a sign of mistrust or an invasion of privacy, but rather, an important step in protecting your company from the risks that come with an untrustworthy employee. Employers cannot rely on resumes alone to determine which candidates will make good employees. 

According to the National Association of Professional Background Screeners, 56 percent of applicants’ resumes contain one or more significant discrepancies. 

Simply having a background check policy in place encourages applicants to be more forthcoming in their resumes and interviews. While a pre-employment screening policy does not guarantee that all “bad” applicants will be weeded out, it does provide employers with the hard data they need to help make informed hiring decisions.

Employers can show that they practice the due diligence required to avoid negligent hiring by having solid pre-employment screening practices in place. Most pre-employment screening programs include a criminal background search conducted at the court for each place the candidate has lived for the last seven years. 

Employers should also verify work history at each company for which the applicant has worked in the last seven years. All degrees and licenses claimed by the applicant should also be verified. These simple steps may be enough to show that an employer took reasonable precautions before hiring an applicant.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires employers that procure a background check from a consumer reporting agency that will be used in a hiring decision to disclose to the candidate that a background check will be conducted. 

If the background check contains items of information that may cause you to make a hiring decision that will adversely affect your candidate for employment, you must provide the candidate with a letter advising that adverse action may be taken, include in the letter the name, address and telephone number of the consumer reporting agency that prepared the report, provide a copy of the background check report, and also provide the FCRA summary of consumer’s rights document that explains the rights consumers have under federal law. 

This gives the candidate an opportunity to dispute any inaccuracies that may be part of that report.

All criminal record searches go back seven years. 

The length at which records can be searched depends on the record bearer. For example, some courts allow for a quick and efficient search of their records further back than seven years. 

The length at which criminal records can be reported to a customer of a consumer reporting agency depends on the type of information being reported as well as applicable federal and state laws that contain prohibitions on reporting certain types of information. As an industry standard, criminal conviction searches date back seven years.

Criminal record searches typically take between 24 and 48 hours to report. However, a number of factors can affect the length of time a search takes, including, the need to match an applicant’s identifiers to court records, the lack of identifiers like date of birth or Social Security Number, common applicant names, court holidays, and multiple records for the same applicant. 

With our user-friendly, web-based software, you will have access to updates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We offer the most comprehensive, full-featured, web-based software system on the market. This system is free to all our clients. It requires no setup fees, no software to buy and no upgrade. You will receive email notifications when an order is placed and when the order has been completed. 

You will have access to the system 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Because the system is Internet-based, it is paperless and will give you access to your records two years after the search was ordered.

No pre-employment screening firm can guarantee that all information on its reports is 100% accurate simply because we must rely on information sources for that accuracy. For example, data will not show up if it was incorrectly entered or missing from the legal system in the first place, if a county does not report its information to the correct agency or if an applicant gets through the legal system using false identifiers. 

However, we are committed to training and developing the industry’s finest pre-employment screening personnel who adhere to the highest quality standards so we can provide the most accurate reports possible to our Daytona Beach and nationwide customers. We earn our customers’ trust by putting them first and providing them with honest, dedicated service.

Pre-employment screening is a very diverse and complex process requiring access to numerous information sources. Generally speaking, a background check costs far less than the new employee’s first day of work, but your cost will vary depending on your customized package. 

Our pre-employment screening consultants can help you build a background check program unique to your organization that is efficient, cost-effective, and offers the integrity all employers need.