Background check is an almost obligatory task that you must do if you are going to hire new employees. Yet it is a sensitive job that needs to be carried out cautiously because it involves delving into the private property of other people. During a screening process of employee recruitment, all job applicants need to be checked comprehensively in order to ascertain whether they are people with integrity and credibility or not. When such check is carried out, employers or human resources managers, like you, have to inspect the very private information of those job applicants so their criminal, financial, social, professional, and academic backgrounds can be recognized and thus their integrity and credibility can be assured. However, since the check investigates job applicants’ criminal records, credit card accounts, driving records, and many other confidential records that are originally not supposed to be exposed to other people except themselves, the check needs to be conducted cautiously and ethically so you are not considered a trespasser to others’ privacy.
Therefore, there are several things that you need to think about if you are going to perform a criminal background check. You should try as minimally as possible to use paid service that lets you inspect all pieces of confidential information of the job candidates because delving into others’ private property, whatever its reason is, is considered unethical. You can still know their working attitude, for example, by contacting their previous employers and ask those employers about the attitude. The information gained from those employers can be considered reliable enough to determine the working attitude of the job applicants.
However, if in the end you need to perform more comprehensive criminal check through a paid service, you need to make sure that you’ve got a written consent from the checked parties. Without such consent, your checking effort will be considered unethical and even illegal.