by Jason Morris

From a great blog we have quoted in the past, The Trust Foundation.

This site has had several articles in the past covering background checks and resume fraud.

Dixie and Steven K Randock Sr., after three years of investigation, were finally caught and charged for producing degrees from made up universities. For a couple thousand dollars, this couple handed out seemingly-legitimate undergrad and masters degrees that required very little or no education. The Randcocks did not just produce the diplomas, but took steps to make sure the degrees looked as credible as possible. For example, they staffed an office of people who would pick up the phone when employers would call to verify the degrees. They also produced some fake degrees from legitimate universities; doing so became much easier as Universities began to offer online classes and degrees.

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by Nick Fishman

It was all SHRM Conference all the time this week at employeescreenIQ. TWIB Notes (This Week in Background Checks) from the blog and employeescreen University include the following:

SHRM Conference Happenings

· SHRM Conference Wrap Up

· Workforce Management Article on SHRM Conference Exhibit Floor

· employeescreenIQ’s List of 10 2009 Trends in Employment Screening

In the coming weeks we look forward to sharing the various PodCast interviews we conducted at the conference highlighted by interviews with SHRM’s China Miner-Gorman, Cheezhead’s Joel Cheesman, Pre-Employment Directory’s Barry Nixon and HRMarketer’s Jonathan Goodman.

by Nick Fishman

One of my favorite shows growing up was a program called This Week in Baseball, hosted by the legendary Mel Allen.  They had a great segment called “TWIB Notes” (This Week In Baseball Notes) which recapped the previous week’s highlights in Major League Baseball.

We thought we’d steal borrow a page from them and will be bring you employeescreenIQ’s version of TWIB Notes (This Week in Background Checks) with highlights of materials posted on employeescreen University and our blog.  So, we’ll start our first ever TWIB Notes with links to the following highlights from this week.

Guest Articles:

Users of Consumer Reports Have New Responsibilities As of November 1, 2008 Under the Federal Trade Commission’s Identity Theft Red Flag Regulations by Seyfarth Shaw’s, Pam Devata

Background Checking Partnerships: No Longer a Luxury but a Necessity by Keith Greene, former Vice President of Workforce Readiness at SHRM

Legislative Updates:

DOT Clears the Way For CDL Employers to Report Drug Use

Connecticut Law Requires Safeguards

Blog Postings:

Did You Conduct a Background Check on Your IT Staff?

Stop By the employeescreenIQ Booth at the Annual SHRM Conference

Employers Ponder Tough Tactics to Halt Smoking

Hope you enjoy these highlights.  We’ll be at the SHRM Conference next week and will try to post from the show floor.  Please stop by and say hello if you’re there.

by Jason Morris

Depending on who you believe, either some, many or most job applicants stretch the truth in their resumes. Here are the most common lies HR managers are being told.

The issue’s gotten some press lately, as both Food Network chef Robert Irvine and Lee McQueen, a contestant on the British version of The Apprentice, were recently ousted as having lied to get their TV jobs.

Apparently they aren’t alone — 48% of job-seekers have stretched the truth on a resume, while 10% have told bold-faced lies, according to a survey by Monster.com. Other studies report discrepancies in as many as 56% of all resumes.

Things you’ll find in a background check

What truths are being stretched? These are the most common areas:

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by Jason Morris

Another reason to make sure your employment screening program is solid.  Its very important to ensure when doing an employment background investigation, your efforts are consistent and compliant.

Resume Fraud Discovered After The Fact Does Not Bar N.J. State Law Discrimination Case

The N.J. Supreme Court issued an important employment law case, Cicchetti v Morris County Sheriff’s Office, ___N.J.___(May 28, 2008). In a 50 page slip opinion involving a matter of first impression, the  Court held that “after-acquired evidence of resume fraud” will not bar a workplace discrimination claim or limit emotional distress or punitive damages under the New Jersey state anti-discrimination statute. Accordingly, a sheriff’s officer who failed to disclose an expunged conviction was not prohibited from pursuing his discrimination based claims. However, the court also indicated that evidence of the conviction can be used to limit or potentially eliminate economic damages, including claims for back pay and front pay if that information would have resulted in the employee’s discharge. The court basically followed McKennon v. Nashville Banner, 513 U.S. 352 (1995). As the court reasoned:

Rather, we conclude that, to the extent that plaintiff seeks an award of economic damages, including backpay and front pay, the McKennon analysis governs this dispute. That is to say, if the defendant employer can bear its burden of proving that it would have terminated plaintiff as soon as it learned of this expunged conviction, then that date may be used to limit any backpay award and to eliminate any front pay award. Finally, however, regardless of whether defendant would have fired plaintiff upon learning of the expunged conviction, plaintiff is entitled to pursue his hostile work environment claim and to recover the full measure of his non-economic damages including, if appropriate, a punitive award. For these claims, the public policy considerations expressed by our Legislature in our antidiscrimination statutes weigh heavily in favor of permitting plaintiff to have his day in court. The principles we further through the LAD demand no less.

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by Jason Morris

I found this blog posting this weekend.  This is a great commentary on an article written in Business Week last week.  In my opinion, and the opinion of the blog author, the article was not an accurate portrayal of the background screening industry.

See Below:

BusinessWeek has an in-depth article this week on business checks and the accuracy of those records.  Its a thought-provoking article that suggests that background checks are a “Wild Wild West” where nothing is regulated.  Moreover, despite the headline that question the accuracy of background checks, the article itself doesn’t contain any statistics or studies to show that. Rather, they use anecdotes to make the point.

But when you look at the article, I was struck by one paragraph that’s buried deep in text:

The company [ChoicePoint] conducts 10 million background checks annually and estimates it has about 20% of the U.S. market. “The number of complaints vs. transactions is very low,” says Katherine Bryant, vice-president for consumer advocacy. The [Federal Trade Commission] has logged 695 complaints against ChoicePoint since 2005, some of which related to [a single] identity-theft episode.

So, for those doing math at home,and if these numbers are to be trusted, there is a 0.000023 percent complaint rate over the last three years filed with the Federal Trade Commission for background checks conducted by ChoicePoint.  That doesn’t strike me as a huge issue whatsoever.

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by Nick Fishman

Good friend Barry Nixon from the National Institute of Workplace Violence and Kim Kerr from Lexis Nexis (yes, a competitor albeit one who crafted a great web post) just wrote a great article that was published by HR.BLR.com about how to develop a background screening policy for your organization. Readers of this blog might recall the Kim and Barry were kind enough to include a chapter on International Background Screening that was written by employeescreenIQ in their recent book Background Screening and Investigations: Managing Hiring Risk from the HR and Security Perspectives. Please see the lists they developed for implementing a policy and the resulting benefits.

Benefits of Implementing a Background Screening Policy

1. Proactive Management of Risk: Risk management is fundamentally about choosing to accept a risk, mitigating the risk, or reducing the risk, and a background screening policy is a clear step to reduce the organization’s risk.
2. Due Diligence and Legal Compliance: A well-crafted background screening policy will position an organization to exercise due diligence, which ultimately will help it avoid the negative consequences of being out of compliance or breaking the law. This helps the organization avoid unnecessary cost and the distraction of resources to address legal issues.
3. Improve Hiring Processes: Background screening provides for the collection of relevant information and verification of the accuracy of the information, which helps an organization to be equipped to make better hiring decisions.
4. Protection of Information: One of the side benefits of implementing an effective background screening policy is that it forces an organization to pay close attention to how it protects individuals’ personal information, which ultimately reduces the likelihood of the organization having a breach in its data and all of the commensurate problems associated with it.
5. Reduce Cost and Improve Profitability: An organization that proactively manages its risk, avoids costly employee problems and lawsuits, has an efficient hiring process, and protects individual personal data will reduce its cost of operations, thus improving the flow of dollars to the bottom line.

Read the full post here . . .post

by Nick Fishman

We found this post on HRResouce.com about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) enforcement efforts to ensure that employers are hiring legal, documented workers: I-9 Audits Return, Verification Expands.  The post was so informative that we didn’t mind the plug for the author’s services at the bottom.  See excerpt below:

ICE had openly abandoned the use of audits and administrative fines for employers’ technical noncompliance with I-9 procedures on the theory that employers seeking to make money from knowing employment of illegal workers will just build such fines into their cost of doing business. Instead, ICE has focused its limited but rapidly increasing worksite enforcement resources on raids and prosecutions in order to achieve the maximum deterrent effect through well-publicized convictions of managers and companies and seizure of company assets, as well as business interruption losses from removal of large numbers of workers.

These actions are part of a larger no-nonsense enforcement strategy articulated with increasing clarity by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has started making State of Immigration speeches describing the multifaceted efforts by the department’s various components to rebuild confidence in the government’s willingness and capability to conduct practical immigration enforcement, while working administratively to streamline and expand legal immigration under existing law and continuing to prove the case for more comprehensive reform. “We are not going to have a silent amnesty,” Chertoff has stated.

It’s not new news that ICE’s efforts are gaining momentum and the ball seems to be rolling towards a federal mandate on E-Verify or alternative Electronic I-9 Confirmation programs.  You just wonder if it will ever happen.  Getting the federal government to agree on anything right now is no small task and with upcoming presidential elections, the political landscape could undergo a major shift.  Who knows?  We’ll just wait on the sidelines and keep you informed.

by Nick Fishman

I read a really funny article on ERE yesterday by a recruiter from Disney that wrote “A Candidate’s Guide to Recruiter-Speak”.

See excerpt below:

Every industry and profession carries with it its own distinct jargon. In fact, it is the measure of recruiters’ worth to be able to pick up on the unique lexicon of the positions for which they recruit.

Being able to spout off the verbal equivalent of Google Adwords also preempts most candidates’ assumptions that as recruiters, we’re slightly above amoeba but slightly beneath bonobo monkeys on the evolutionary ladder. (The monkeys do admittedly win by default, though like recruiters, they have been known to eat their young, although most of us do this figuratively through the invention of the concept of “entry-level” employment.)

There’s been a lot of attention paid to the banalities of “corporate speak,” those words such as synergy, deliverables, scalable, and, my personal favorite, paradigm shift, which sounds suspiciously like a Led Zeppelin cover band or a Tom Clancy novel.

Additionally, there is a preponderance of words that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever to anyone outside of a specialized functional area.

Read the full article here . . .

He goes on to list these terms in a rather humorous manner, however one that if true doesn’t really speak well for the industry.  Funny is funny though and I can respect creativity.  Where I take exception is to the following excerpt:

Background check (n) Usage: “You’re our final candidate, but I can’t extend an offer until your background check clears.” Definition: A control imposed by corporations in order to slow recruiters’ ability to extend an offer for a period of time that perfectly coincides with a candidate’s extension and acceptance of other offers. Alternate definition: An industry whose practitioners continue to thrive despite the Internet’s abilities to perform the same functionality at a fraction of the cost.

It’s certainly okay to have a sense of humor, but the assertion that a thorough and accurate background check is only a mouse click away is either ill-informed or irresponsible. There are two many examples of others who are lulled into that same false sense of security and one need only follow the news to find regular instances of companies who said they performed background checks only to have a major incident in the workplace. Many times, these incidents could have been avoided by performing a proper background check.

There will always be a sense of concern among recruiters that they will lose good candidates when a background check takes too long. However, if you have the right screening partner they are doing a good job of explaining what is going on when delays occur. Check out a recent article I wrote on this very topic:

Background Screeners & Recruiters: We Can All Get Along

The author should reconsider the ramifications of relying on only an instant database search as the sole means of conducting a background check and what exposure that might cause his employer and any others who would believe his thoughts on what constitutes an effective search.

by Jason Morris

I just saw this blog while doing some research.  I think the volunteers claim that the background checks are a violation of civil rights is ridiculous.  I didn’t take the time to comment on the posting but did read some interesting rhetoric and heated debate below the article.  “Its all fun and games till someone gets hurt”….my mom used to say this all the time!  The same people claiming that the background checks are unnecessary will be the same people complaining when something happens to a kid that a simple background check would have prevented!