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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't there be other ways for you to prove you were a "Level 4" or whatever at Apple and not an associate? An offer letter from Apple? Or just the totality of circumstances in general. If say you're interviewing for a "Sr Engineer" position, you're just not going to have an instance where the candidate shows experience and knowledge but doesn't get hired because some record from Lexis Nexis says that he was an "associate" at Apple prior to coming here. Something like that I feel would get resolved in conversation very quickly.

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> Wouldn't there be other ways for you to prove you were a "Level 4" or whatever at Apple and not an associate? An offer letter from Apple?

Having gone through this with several employers, the largest company doing this verification is HireRight. HireRight is BEYOND incompetent at every single level. They refuse documentation such as offer letters on company letterhead to prove a title. The only documentation they accept from applicants is highly sensitive tax documentation from the IRS, which of course does not contain titles but incidentally reveals compensation details they can hoover up into their database but is not relevant to the purpose they were hired by your future employer to do.

If you think credit reporting agencies in the US are Machiavellian and maliciously incompetent, wait until you deal with employment verification firms, they're worse and often the same corporate entities (as noted in the article, another large one is WorkNumber owned by Equifax). These entities put most of the work onto the candidate, display no competence or care for accuracy whatsoever, and generally deliver intentionally misleading or inaccurate results to your future employer. It's so pervasive, that my own complaints to my recruiter were heeded and understood because in their words "oh their reports are always wrong about employment history, we only pay attention to the criminal background check part."

So, in short, no you can't simply provide a valid offer letter showing the title you were hired with to prove that title or to prove a promotion.

Can confirm. And Apple used HireRight when they hired me.

Me too. HireRight was somehow completely unable to contact some of my previous employers. Situation resulted in me visiting old offices in person for proof of employment to satisfy HireRight.

This all occurred after I had accepted the job offer and took a long and stressful time.

> This all occurred after I had accepted the job offer and took a long and stressful time.

Same situation for me, which is especially problematic because it's standard practice for offers or start dates of employment in the US to be contingent on the return of a clear background check within the first 30-90 days. Which means you might have already started onboarding to the new role and still be fighting with HireRight (has happened to me 3 times in ~18 years). More annoyingly, HireRight's own databases don't refer to previous points in time when you've corrected their errors, so each time starts from square one.

Just went through hire right for the second time in my life -- interestingly they do now warn you to redact your income information from the w-2s they require.

I checked my data on The Work Number [1], and see that my prior employer shared details on pay, overtime and even Bonuses received!

It seem my prior employers were providing information down to gross and net pay PER pay cycle, with details about my medical, dental and vision insurance coverage [!!]

This is from Equifax, the company that got hacked and lost PII, and they are getting extremely detailed information!

[1] https://employees.theworknumber.com/

You can try (especially if you know ahead of time) but background check is done by a third party. Recruiters and interviewers don't care until background check flags it. You can try to be upfront about it, but it just creates a weird situation and they will defer to the 3rd party background check anyway. Any evidence you may share with the background check company is not present on the final background report (since it might contain salary information which would be illegal i guess). It's a little bit like credit reporting, if your bank misreports in a few places you are f*ed.

3rd party background checks are notoriously noisy. Companies that expect them to be the Word of God are, at best, naïve.

Every employer should be ready to resolve "discrepancies" that come back without any negative thoughts about the potential employee. If they can't or won't do that, I don't think you want to work for them.

A few years ago, I was involved in a spinoff and they decided that all the employees would need to go through a background check. Of the ~90 people, something like 10 people (>10%!!!) had weird stuff that turned out to be completely wrong. For example, one person was reported to be currently in prison 5 states over. Some others were "we can't verify this person ever worked for ABC Corp". We were ABC Corp.

Most of these background check companies, they'd say of course there are a lot of Mike Smiths around, but Patty Jones? No no, there has only ever been one Patty Jones in all of human history.

Yes, what I imagine would happen is that the background check company will contact you, you'll send them your last paycheck with your title on it and be done with it.

Titles are almost never on paychecks, so there wouldn't be any such thing as a "last paycheck with your title on it." Also, a paycheck contains pay information, which is something you cannot legally be required to provide to a new/prospective employer, which the background check company is acting on behalf of.

I had a background check at an employer, not for a sensitive position, who, when unable to verify employment, found my Facebook and reached out to someone on there (who happened to be my partner) to see if they would "confirm" what they knew to be my job.

That was after their initial email to me:

"Hi, we're about to start your background check. Just want to confirm that this is the correct email address for you?

Are these also the correct details for you? [And proceeded to list Full SSN, address, DOB]."

Like, I'm really rather glad that this actual _was_ the correct email address. But in any case I was furious. On both counts.

In credit to my employer, once I reviewed these two things with them, they fired the background check company.

Your new employer can believe you? If they are hiring simply based on a couple words from a different company, then there is going to be risk for them.

I mean, you could link them to a Washington Post article explaining the situation.

Maybe covered by NDA or could be forged?

I don't know how it works if you accept the NDA and get promoted within.

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