With the growing threat of terrorism around the world, a background check has become a necessity for most companies and even people. Background check is a process in which the specifics of an individual’s past are revealed for the purposes of employment, obtaining access to classified information, or obtaining restricted items. It might suddenly come upon you to do a background check on someone during one or the other time in your life. So how will you go about the process? That is what brings us to this article on how to do a background investigation.
Background investigations are generally conducted to corroborate information found on an employment application or résumé. They may also be conducted as a way to further differentiate potential employees and pick the one the employer feels is best suited for the position.
While in some countries, it is an option solely at the discretion of the employer, in the United States, the Brady Bill requires criminal background checks for those wishing to purchase handguns from licensed firearms dealers. Background checks are also a necessity for buying restricted firearms, explosives or large quantities of precursor chemicals, and concealed weapons permits also require criminal background checks. These investigations are also required for those working in positions with special security concerns, such as airline transportation. Other laws exist to prevent those who do not pass a background check from working in careers involving the elderly, disabled, or children.
In order to save money and the hassle of hiring a private investigator to do the checking, there is a cheaper option available as well, which is being utilized quite liberally by employers, parents and even dating partners. This is the Google search engine. You can conduct free background checks on Google – all you need to do is type in the person’s full name and add a few phrases along with that describing his or her professional or personal background, and hit search. While Google can help you out quite often, there is no guarantee that it will provide you with a complete picture of the person’s background. In some cases, the search engine might even return back zero results on the person’s name.
Most of the times background checks start with information provided by the person who is being investigated. You should ideally ask the subject to fill out a form detailing all of their past employers for at least the last five years, all of the addresses where they have lived, any arrests and convictions, and other necessary information which might help you Google your subject better. Apart from just Google, this sort of information will also help your investigator along the way.
During this entire background checking process, what’s most important for you to remember is that you need to search on all the applicants, and not just some. You also cannot go around poking your nose into scandalous information which is irrelevant to the position for which the person has applied. If you are caught doing so, there might very well be lawsuits filed against you for invasion of privacy and discrimination at the workplace. While it’s not easy to do a background check, it’s not all that hard either to learn the proper way of how to do a background investigation.
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