What Are the Top 5 Reasons to Conduct Criminal Background Checks?

There are many reasons to perform a background check on people. Employers use criminal background checks to influence their hiring decisions. Individuals just like you and I sometimes use them for dating purposes, and there are also many professionals that use them for official law enforcement reasons. No matter your reasons for wanting to conduct a criminal background check on someone, you need to make sure to use a reputable background checker.

For now, let’s take a quick look at the top five reasons to conduct the best criminal background check on a person when making a hiring decision.

Create a Safe Work Environment

When it comes to running a business, you, of course, want it to be a safe place for you and your employees (or those you are in charge of managing). Creating a safe workplace starts with making sure none of your employees are violent offenders. You can check for violent offenses by doing a criminal background check. Take for example that you operate a daycare center for children. The staff at your daycare need to go through an extensive background check to ensure they have not committed any crimes against children or adults. With a background check, you can quickly weed out applicants who have had prior violent offenses.

Keep the Workplace Drug-Free

It’s also important to keep the workplace free of drugs. Employees who are under the influence of illegal drugs are well-known to have higher incidences of work-related injuries than those employees that don’t have a criminal record relating to drug offenses. By doing criminal background checks, it becomes possible to do much more than weed to the candidates who have prior drug charges. In fact, with a criminal background check, you can stay up to date on any of your employees and their ties with drug-related criminal charges.

Recognize Criminal Patterns

One of the best ways to become familiar with criminal patterns is to study them, and criminal background checks can assist. When you do a background check on someone who has prior offenses, you can evaluate those offenses, and most times, you will see patterns in the checks that you do that result in convicted offenses. Many places of employment need to ensure they do not hire people who exhibit patterns of criminal activity. This is often seen in the banking and financial industry as well as the educational sector.

Fulfills Due Diligence

When you do a background check on someone, it will reveal a lot of pertinent information about the person. Some of the information and data you see on the background report will have a lot of relevance to the job application while a lot of the other information may not. Still yet, it’s your decision to decide which pieces of information impact your organization and which ones do not. The goal is to make sure you hire someone for each position that is not only qualified but doesn’t exhibit character traits or patterns that may lead to illegal activity that directly affects the employer; this is what is known as fulfilling your due diligence during the hiring process.

Verify Resume

Lastly, you should conduct a criminal background check because it can help verify the information listed on an applicant’s resume. You’ll not only be able to use some information to verify employment history, but also any of the other important documents or statements that the applicant has revealed to you.

Final Thoughts

To ensure you do all that you can to make your place of employment as successful as possible, make sure to always conduct criminal background checks through a reputable provider of such checks.