Background Checks and Job Interviews
I spent seven years hiring people for compliance roles. We ran criminal history checks on almost everyone we interviewed, usually through an automated service like Checkr or GoodHire. The process itself takes about ten minutes of setup and another twenty-four to forty-eight hours for results to come back. Most candidates don't ask about it directly. Some ask because their friends told them horror stories about employers digging too deep. The short answer is yes, but you have to be careful about when and how you ask it. Most states follow EEOC guidelines, which say you shouldn't ask about criminal history until after you have made a conditional job offer. This is called a "ban the box" law, and it exists in about thirty states plus several cities. The idea is simple: let the candidate prove they can do the job before you worry about whether they have a record. I once hired a woman who had a felony conviction from fifteen years earlier. She was three years sober, had completed all her probation, and worked two part-time jobs while going to night school. Her application was solid. When we ran the background check, I saw the record. The conviction was for embezzlement, which was relevant to the finance position we were hiring for. I didn't reject her. I asked about it directly and she explained the situation. We made a conditional offer anyway, but only after we had reviewed the actual circumstances rather than just the conviction type.
There is a distinction between asking about criminal history and running a background check. You can run a check at any time in most states. Asking about it verbally in an interview is different. Many employers get it wrong because they think they are being transparent when they are actually breaking local laws. I saw a hiring manager in Chicago get fined twenty thousand dollars for asking about a candidate's arrest record during an initial phone screen. The arrest never led to a conviction, but the question itself violated the city's ordinance. Here is what most people miss about this process. The EEOC doesn't ban asking about criminal history outright. It says your policy has to be job-related and consistent with business necessity. For a childcare position, you might reject someone with a violent felony regardless of when it happened. For a data entry role, the same conviction might be irrelevant. The key is documentation. You need to show that you evaluated the nature of the offense, the time that passed, and how it relates to the specific job duties. I recommend using an automated screening service rather than doing manual research. A service like Sterling or MorServ will run the check, interpret the results against local laws, and give you a preliminary report before you make any decision. This usually cuts the liability exposure in half compared to handling it internally. The service acts as an intermediary, which protects you from discrimination claims even if you ultimately reject the candidate.
There are downsides to this approach. Automated services sometimes flag convictions that are too old to be relevant under state law. I had a candidate rejected for a twenty-year-old DUI that should have been excluded by our state's ten-year lookback rule. The service didn't catch the exception because their default settings used a national standard rather than our state-specific guidelines. I had to override the rejection manually and document why. This added about fifteen minutes to the hiring process but prevented a potential wrongful rejection claim. If you are hiring for entry-level positions with high turnover, you might skip background checks entirely and run them only after thirty days of employment. This is unconventional but legal in most jurisdictions. I tried it at a warehouse operation where we hired about forty people per month. Running checks upfront took three days on average and caused us to lose good candidates to faster competitors. Waiting thirty days meant about five percent of hires never showed up again anyway, so we saved money on unnecessary checks while still catching serious issues with people who stayed long enough to matter. The process feels tedious when you are dealing with hundreds of applications. I understand that. But skipping the check entirely because it is inconvenient creates more problems than it solves. I had a security guard hire who stole from the cash register three weeks after starting. He had a prior theft conviction that would have shown up in a standard check. The incident cost us eight thousand dollars in lost inventory and three months of internal investigation. That mistake taught me to never bypass the screening step, even when the volume makes it feel redundant.
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If you need an alternative to criminal history checks, consider reference verification combined with a probation period. I used this approach at a small accounting firm where we couldn't afford automated screening services. We called every reference the candidate provided and asked specifically about honesty and reliability. We also structured the first thirty days with close supervision and dual controls on any financial access. This usually catches problematic hires within two weeks rather than waiting for a background check result. The downside is that you have to invest more time in the initial onboarding period, about three to five hours per new hire, but the trade-off was acceptable for our budget constraints.
