Getting Arrested can Affect Background Checks

A criminal record search is one of the most important sources of gathering information for employers which means that employers can take special efforts to examine the kind people who they are hiring. We are living in an age of digital information and the commercial world is currently ungovernable without the proper application of strict measures, compliance and risk mitigation. Therefore, a recruiter should take great care in complying with federal, state and company policy while hiring prospective candidates. This is the reason why you must understand some critical procedures that are applied in checking arrest records for prospective employees.

When a person is arrested and detained on grounds of civil offense, that event goes into permanent records of the government but it never goes away. In spite of the fact whether an individual is guilty or not, an arrest record can negatively affect their chances of employment depending on where the arrest took place. Any arrest or any judicial detention, however, is not just recorded as an arrest. It should be further categorized depending on the kind of judicial outcome of the arrest. The arrest could be classified into the following categories:

Dismissed Charges

Dismissed Charges are probably the most employment-friendly arrest record people can get. It means that the legal obligation for some reason was either negotiated or obligated or the charges against the suspected individual were dropped. In most cases, it denotes innocence, mistaken identity or civil pardon by the accused victims.

Not-Guilty Arrests

Not-Guilty Arrests also insinuates innocence and is considered safe in comparison to other types of judgments. This kind of arrest record means that the police or the prosecuting attorney was not convinced of the suspect’s innocence but got defeated in the court trials.

Pending Case Arrests

This type of arrest record should never be taken lightly. The hiring process on general terms is very tedious, time-consuming and very expensive so an employer should never take the risk of hiring a person who has the chances of ending up in getting convicted.

Arrests that Lead to Convictions

These type of arrests records are most unfavorable scenarios of getting employment. In fact, regardless of the numerous acts that have been made to protect prospective candidates from discrimination on the grounds of previous arrests, criminal records do not count in any of them.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act allows employers and recruiters to find and use judicial arrest records in their hiring processes. However, as a recruiter, you must be careful to comply with state laws and anti-discriminatory laws decided by the federal bodies.

However many people have the question as of whether a dismissed case can show up on a background check or not the answer is a tricky one. On general scenarios, dismissals and not guilty verdicts can show up on a criminal record. Cases that go as far as a criminal charge or a criminal trial are different than cases involving arrests that ate times lead nowhere. In some states however employers are not legally permitted to query about arrest records or hold them against prospective job candidates but there is no similar law or trend for dismissals.

About The Author Nivedita Gupta is a content marketer and writes on business topics for various clients including cFirst Background Checks, a leading background check company in the US.