When a Background Check Makes for Tough Interview Questions

When a Background Check Makes for Tough Interview QuestionsWhen a Background Check Makes for Tough Interview QuestionsEveryone faces curveballs in interviews. But when can skeletons in your closet reach out to hurt your chances?Every career guide ever written covers the tough job-interview questions Why do you want to work here? What is your greatest weakness?That advice rarely extends to questions that cut closer to home explaining away the DWI you got on the way back from dinner with a client or the rumors of fraud that painted everyone laid off from the finance department where you worked after the stock price collapsed. There is little to prepare you to answer questions about the well-respected boss who never got along with you and asked you to resign or the sexual-harassment charge leveled against you but dismissed, years earlier.It is elend uncommon to have something lurking in your past or left off your resume that might upset your job search or present an obstacle in intervie w. And it neednt be an Enron-scale scandal to cause you concern. A black mark on your record (like a negative meinung in an employment hintergrund check or a lie uncovered in an employment and education verification check) can be enough to send a hiring manager on to the next candidate.Recruiters and investigators who conduct employment background checks advise job seekers to know what their records will say to a potential employer and be prepared to correct or explain them in an interview.If they got a degree at a diploma mill, that will be revealed in a respectable background check if they didnt work at an employer they listed, or didnt have the job title they said they had, that will come out, said Les Rosen, former California deputy district attorney president of Employment Screening Resources of Novato, Calif. and founding member of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners.The problem for job seekers is that there isnt a lot they can do to keep secrets unde r wraps while theyre job-searching or even afterward. If you have a black mark on your record, expect it to surface, Rosen said. When a person with something minor in their background tries to hide it, they are taking a risk.Almost everyone is doing background checks on every hire its the quickest way to get rid of applicants, said Jo Prabhu, founder and CEO of placement firm 1800Jobquest.com of Long Beach, Calif., and an expert on using background checks in hiring. It goes even down to the administrative level someone might be a felon or have some arrests. So they check everyone.What records matter?Most employers arent even interested in your criminal past unless its relevant to the job for which youre applying, Prabu said. Employers usually just want to know that youve done the time or paid the fine and that the whole thing was resolved at least two years ago, she said.I did have a woman who got a DUI on New Years Eve, but that was easy to explain, Prabu said. If it was something in college or not related to the job, employers arent interested.If youre applying for a financial position, theyll do an additional credit check, and that might be relevant, she said. But they dont check civil suits or other things. Its too expensive, and its not relevant.If during the last five years you were convicted of check fraud, and I was hiring you to do a job where you had access to finances, that would be a concern, said Robert E. Capwell, chief knowledge officer at Employment Background Investigations Inc. of Owings Mills, Md. If you were a registered sex offender and were working with children or with members of the opposite sex, that would be, too. The question is how long ago was the crime and how relevant is it to the job youre discussing.Potential employers want to gauge their own level of risk or more perversely if your black mark involves the kind of financial shenanigans that made Wall Streeters rich at the expense of regulations and their own stockholders whet her youre still willing to play hardball.Well find out pretty quickly if you said you were the VP of operations (for an entire company) but it was only a department, and by verifying dates of employment, well find out you said you worked somewhere for a year, but it was only six months and you got fired and then didnt work anywhere for six months, Capwell said. Former employers cant say much, but they are supposed to verify dates and titles.Full disclosureAbout the only real solution to a glitch in an otherwise resume-polished background is full disclosure, investigators and recruiters agreed.Derogatory information honestly revealed and discussed by the applicant is much less harmful than if its discovered by a third party, ESRs Rosen said. Even if the companys not really looking, one of the most productive sources of background checks is co-workers.If youre a six-figure person, you have to start with the assumption there are a lot of people working with you or under you who are int erested and are going to look you up, he said. Theyre ready to go on the Internet and see if youre a sex offender because that information isnt hard for consumers to find or what degrees youre claiming in your LinkedIn profile or other business connection, and whether you ever went there.Since theres not any real way to conceal derogatory information, its better to know what might be disclosed about you during a background check. Have a background check done on yourself to check that the information is accurate. If you find false information, you can try to correct the inaccuracies, but there is little you can do to hide negative, but accurate items, Prabhu said. The best advice is to be prepared to explain them and you cant do that until you know what someone will find.There are a lot of people with things on their record that arent discharged like a DUI that someone got a long time ago and then moved to another state before the state sent them a notice saying to pay the fine, s he said. That would show up on your record looking as if you fled the state, even if its not true.There is a dramatic increase in the number of searches being done and the types of tools that are being used, Rosen said There will almost always be a driving record, for example. Its an inexpensive record to get, and it turns up DUIs or drug incidents that can reveal alcohol or drug problems that way.Honesty is about the only choice, especially when waffling about tough questions would raise enough red flags that a potential employer would either drop you or investigate further, according to Jim Villwock, an experienced financial-industry executive turned career coach and author of Whacked Again Secrets to Getting Back on the Executive Saddle. What (hiring managers) want to know, he said, is, Are you going to do the same thing to me?