How criminal background checks affect employment

Although advisors are promising that as a country we are recovering from the economic downturn of 2009 and 2010, unemployment is as big an issue as ever. With so many job seekers, companies are in a position where they can really pick and choose who they hire for a vacant position. Part of this is bound to be some intense scrutiny on the criminal background checks of applicants, and discarding those who aren’t 100% clean. About 65 million Americans – that’s one in four adults – have an arrest or conviction that can show up on a routine criminal background check, according to the Huffington Post. What’s found can effectively upend their search for work or put them out of a job amid one of the most difficult job markets in recent history. Ultimately, that’s a large amount of the work-force who may be refused a job due to mistakes in their past rather than their vocational abilities. A booming private criminal background industry has made clients of all kinds of companies doing everything from cleaning offices and delivering pizzas to sorting and delivering retail merchandise, said Maurice Emsellem, a policy co-director for the National Employment Law Project and one of the researchers behind the NELP report. While it’s important to maintain a safe and secure workplace, it’s equally important to get people back in the workplace. It will be interesting to see how this trends over the remainder of the year.]]>