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Comment by jzwinck | Hacker News Reader

There are two kinds of background checks. The official kind done by a dedicated team with access and knowledge to retrieve city, state and federal data. And the HR kind, where someone without an investigative background and education spends ten minutes doing web searches and online "stalking" to see if the candidate has any untoward elements in their past.

The first kind costs hundreds dollars per candidate. The second can be done for about twenty bucks worth of time. You can guess which approach most companies use.

It's easier on most candidates, too, because a real background check requires them to fill out paperwork. An ad hoc one they may never know about...unless they fail.

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>There are two kinds of background checks.

IBM. Wells Fargo. Frontier Airlines. T-Mobile. Experian. Daimler Chrysler.

These are some of the companies listed in the article. They are some of the biggest in the world. They don't seem to me to be the type of companies that take the latter approach to recruitment, possibly opening themselves up to discrimination legal issues.

They probably do both. The official background check may come back clean. But, as soon as the HR guy or hiring manager put his name through Google, they see "So and so convicted of dealing crack."

Surely one of the first things he does when contacting a company is to warn them that a web search will find these things, but that he has been exonerated, and to provide documentation as to such?

I just find it incredibly sad that the people conducting these background checks at such large companies are so utterly incompetent.

I'm not sure I agree that this is a sign of incompetence. Instead, it's likely a case of extreme risk aversion.

Hiring somebody is risky and expensive. The cost for getting it wrong is quite high. At best, it costs the team money in lost productivity. At worst, the new hire actually is a criminal (or whatever).

Given two otherwise equal applicants, it's only prudent to hire the one that doesn't have nasty Google results.

It may have been contracting agencies. They can be pretty uneven, in my experience.

The article states that he's gotten job offers before that were he couldn't accept, presumably because he failed the second kind of background check. Would the employers generally tell someone the reason for rescinding an offer?

In America they would absolutely not disclose the reason for not hiring someone. Commonly accepted HR wisdom in the US is that it would open the company up to lawsuits.

They might not tell you the precise reason, but if you had a written offer contingent on passing a background check that was rescinded, they would tell you that you did not pass the background check.

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