About 80% of employers search and track the online activities of candidates in a practice often referred to as cyber-vetting. How and why is this done? How should you do it? Where is it going?

Here are a couple of ways employers are using cyber-vetting to assess candidates:

For a writing position, the employer will check a candidate’s blog or any writing he or she has done online, and if grammatical errors and typos are legion, they may not want to hire that person. But even more generally, employers see good writing as a measure of attention to detail, professionalism, and conscientiousness for any job, just as they would assess mistakes on a resume. Similarly, if an employer is looking for a social media manager, but can’t find an account on Google+ or Twitter for the candidate, they may wonder if he or she is on top of their game.

For professions in which a network is important, such as sales or recruiting, the connections themselves can be seen as an asset for the potential employer and was mentioned at least once in research by Brenda L. Berkelaar, assistant professor at the University of Texas-Austin, who has published research on cyber-vetting, and is about to release more on the topic.

Another example of how cyber-vetting can help both the candidate and employer can be found in a candidate’s participation in online forums. This is particularly beneficial for those seeking technical jobs, but is becoming more prevalent for a variety of industries in which people ask questions online, as the responses are often viewed as a sign of technical expertise. Because of this, such online platforms are sometimes used as a sourcing tool for employers. On the flip side, however, for individuals at the other end of the spectrum—those who can be found playing online all day instead of doing their job—cyber-vetting can backfire in a big way.

Handle With Care

Because cyber-vetting is often done without the candidate’s knowledge and has the potential to provide employers with access to data that can lead to discrimination (i.e. age, sex, race, religion, etc.), it can be seen as a questionable practice.

When a finalist for a chief of police position in Northern California became the subject of cyber-vetting, a very inappropriate Facebook page appeared. Before discounting the candidate, the recruiting team confronted him, only to find out that it was not his page. Upon further investigation, recruiters discovered that the page had been created by his rival.

This is one of the many cases author Ed Appel discusses in his book, Internet Searches for Vetting, Investigation and Open-Source Intelligence. Stories like this make the practice of cyber-vetting a topic of discussion and academic research.

If You Don’t, Managers Will

The future of cyber-vetting is going in two directions.

The first one is the extension of the simple Google search, thanks to sites that have consolidated search results from multiple sources and use the model of metasearch engines like Metacrawler or Dogpile to create a more comprehensive profile.

The second direction is to take a mixed approach in which you involve candidates to get detailed feedback from real colleagues by using the collective intelligence model of Yelp or Amazon’s product rating. In both cases, the results are often surprising in terms of what is revealed. The site Spokeo, an example of the first direction, shows data that employers will probably never want candidates to see: gender, age, race, religion, political affiliation, and details on hobbies, education, and occupation. At Checkster on the other hand, we take a different approach, requesting candidates to invite pre-defined colleagues to rate them confidentially online along a set of attributes that are relevant to the employer and can provide them a good way to assess the match, taking advantage the accuracy of collective intelligence.

Cyber-vetting will be used more and more by organizations, first to avoid surprises, and more as a digital background and fact-checking tool. Second, it will be used as a way to assess the expertise, motivation, and in some aspects the character of the candidates. Finally, it will expand into leveraging the collective intelligence that social network contains.

We know that even if HR does not perform cyber-vetting, or admit to doing so, hiring managers will. So as Appel mentions, the point is not to assist employers on how to avoid cyber-vetting, but rather give guidelines on how to perform it successfully.

Recommended Guidelines

There are three simple guidelines to follow in order to make sure you are not misled by false online identities or feedback, and that you do not cross the line by making it a source of discrimination:

1. Make sure you inform the candidate that you are going to perform cyber-vetting. You can even ask the candidate to provide information (i.e. emails, websites, aliases, etc.) as to where to find them online.
2. If you find compromising data, make sure to validate it first, as it may not truly belong to the candidate. If time does not permit for such verification, just know you are at risk of having the false information negatively impact your organization.
3. Make sure any collective intelligence solution you use has a fraud protection algorithm.

If you are really strict, you can do like some employers and inform candidates when they are onsite that you are going to perform cyber-vetting, but then ask them to go to their online accounts with you (you do not ask for passwords) so you can see the suitability of their exchanges. When done this way, some people opt out, and this is often the case for high-risk jobs. Today the White House asks candidates to reveal any online content that may be compromising before they are nominated.

Cyber-vetting is a standard practice in its basic form and will continue to evolve in the future. Because technology moves quickly, make sure you have guidelines in place to avoid any legal issues.

As you might imagine, this is causing an outcry about the privacy implications. Last week, just days after Facebook extended its facial recognition to Europe and other countries, a group of privacy organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. One of the issues is that Facebook requires users to opt-out rather than opt-in to the service. The bigger part, however, is over what data Facebook is collecting and how it will be used.

European Union regulators raised the alarm last week, and now some in Congress are complaining about Facebook’s implementation.

Facebook’s response? “We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them.” To be fair to Facebook, the service has been around for months in the U.S. without much complaint. But a Sophos blog post complained that it was turned on for users elsewhere without any notification, and that the default is on.

However it all ultimately shakes out, HR professionals should consider the implications of being able to see — not just read — what their corporate friends have been up to.

First, some history.

Recruiters use Facebook to background prospects, despite the many cautions about doing so. The issues range from potential EEOC problems to the very reliability of the information. ERE writer Raghav Singh, a partner in a staffing firm, noted last year that “virtually everything seen online is unstructured and from sources of unknown credibility.”

Nonetheless, as the survey he cites notes, “84 percent of U.S. recruiters think it is proper to consider personal data posted online when evaluating a candidate.”

So no surprise that career counselors warn college students about their online socializing. They’ve been warned so often and for so long that their Facebook (and before that, MySpace) pictures and posts can hurt their job prospects, that anyone who doesn’t know isn’t listening. Two years ago a Zdnet article put it bluntly: “Are drunk Facebook photos killing your job prospects?”

Now, the facial recognition technology is kicking the problem up more than a notch. Instead of posting and tagging a picture at a time — a laborious chore if you have multiple pictures with multiple people in each — Facebook will now scan the new photos and suggest names for each person it can identify. With a single click, one picture or 100 can be tagged.

It only suggests names of your Facebook friends, so business sites (Pages, in Facebook parlance) with fans aren’t as directly affected by the facial recognition service as are the personal sites. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t affected.

Since last month “people have the ability to tag Pages in their photos on Facebook in the same way they can tag their friends.” People who are tagged in those pictures become visible to those who visit the business site.

To make clear what this means: Someone uploads a picture and tags it to a business Facebook site. The picture is now visible on the business’ page, along with the tags of anyone in the picture.

Should the picture be of a career open house, showing the candidates, including some from the crosstown competitor, the potential for mischief is clear.

When it comes to the personal pages of recruiters who have crated accounts for pipeline purposes, tagged pictures of their “friends” offer a mosaic of the activities of individuals in their network, whether or not they are even aware of it.

Admittedly, this is not a new situation. Picture tagging has been available for a while. But now that Pages (business profiles) can be tagged in pictures, and facial recognition enables one-click tagging of multiple images, the door has swung open pretty wide. Besides the career fair example above, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see what other implications there might be. The annual company picnic or holiday party come to mind.

Yes, people can delete the tags. And they can opt out of having Facebook automatically suggest their name to a picture owner (though the person can still manually enter their name). Search Engine Watch details how to opt-out.

It’s a little more problematic for businesses, since being tagged in a photo has branding value. But that means living with some pictures you might rather not have appear on your site.

Some control is in the hands of the photo poster, who can choose to make the picture viewable by everyone, which means it appears publicly on the photos tab of the business’s Facebook pages, or viewable just by their friends.

Administrators can disable tagged photos from appearing by managing the settings. Then, no user photos will appear.

Of the 783 responses to the survey conducted in March by EmployeeScreenIQ, 21 percent of the respondents reported they credit check all their employees. Last year EmployeeScreenIQ found only 15 percent reported doing that.

Whether they check all or just some employees, more companies are checking. The survey found two-thirds of perform credit checks; that’s up from 61 percent last year.

SHRM got similar numbers when it surveyed members in winter 2009. Forty percent said they credit-checked no one; 13 percent reported credit checking everyone.

It seems surprising that the number of companies performing universal credit checks is going up, even as the debate over whether they should even be allowed is intensifying.

At least four states — Hawaii, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington — now limit the use of credit histories in hiring. Massachusetts and Hawaii also prohibit asking about criminal records on initial applications.

Doing business outside those states is no safe harbor. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has turned up the heat on the use of credit histories, suing Kaplan Higher Education Corp. last December. The suit claims Kaplan denied jobs based on credit histories in such a way that it had a disparate impact on blacks.

That suit came not two months after the EEOC held hearings on the use of credit checks in hiring. In opening the hearing, EEOC chair Jacqueline Berrien set the purpose:

As the nation’s leading enforcer of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination, the EEOC’s ultimate concern is whether these screening practices, devices or tools deny equal employment opportunity to any workers in the country and are keeping qualified and capable people from entering the workplace for unfair reasons.

No surprise that Nick Fishman, VP and co-founder of EmployeeScreenIQ, blogged a warning. “The EEOC is especially targeting ‘bright line’ hiring decisions that automatically exclude candidates with criminal records, arrest records that don’t result in a conviction, and/or poor credit.”

Yet, just a few months later, the EmployeeScreenIQ survey found that 8 percent of companies will outright reject a candidate based on adverse background information. In fairness, the report notes that it is possible all those companies are in regulated industries (transportation, for instance) where certain types of black marks are mandatory disqualifiers.

On the other hand, 92 percent of the respondents said they’d either give the candidate a chance to explain the situation, or would weigh other factors more heavily. Indeed, in another part of the survey, 90 percent of respondents weighed qualifications as most important or important in making a hiring decision. Next, was the interview with 75 percent rating it as important or most important.

The survey had some other interesting tidbits such as despite finding that 53 percent of employers use LinkedIn to source candidates, only 35 percent ever use it for background screening.

Of those who do use social networking and other online sources for backgrounding, most would knock out a candidate only if they discovered the person had lied about qualifications or made discriminatory remarks. But 50 percent would also eliminate a candidate based on the kind of pictures that were posted or details about drinking or drug use.

Those latter two in particular could get you in trouble. As the report points out:

Unfortunately employers who make such judgment calls based on social networking results may legitimately fall into the crosshairs of the EEOC and other regulatory agencies. Employers are encouraged to create a corporate social networking policy that prohibits the use of protected class information found on such sites, and that calls for validating negative information before taking action.

That’s the upshot of a SHLPreVisor study of more than 460 human resources professionals. The majority (53%) were in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with 39% in the Americas and 8% in Australasia. Here’s a chart showing what’s being searched:

“Reasonable investigations of applicants and employees aid the government in ensuring the security of its facilities and in employing a competent, reliable workforce,” said the opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito. That the workers who sued the government on privacy grounds were contractors and not civil servants was a formality and all but irrelevant, Alito wrote.

The case was brought by 28 scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena  The sprawling facility is operated by the California Institute of Technology. The plaintiffs are employees of Caltech.

All of the contractors had worked at the lab for years, participating in such projects as the Mars rover. While they had all been vetted prior to first working at the lab, they had not been subjected to the more rigorous checks undergone by government workers.

Following the 9/11 attacks, President Bush ordered security checks extended to anyone working on government funded projects. The scientists and engineers balked at questions about their relationships, drug use and drug treatment, and mental health counseling.

They sued. In addition to arguing they were not government workers and therefore not subject to the same requirements, they pointed out they did not work on sensitive security projects, and that the questions violated their right to privacy.

When the 9th Distinct Court of Appeals ruled in their favor, the government appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the decision, joined by five of the nine justices, Alito said “Like any employer, the Government is entitled to have its projects staffed by reliable, law-abiding persons who will ‘efficiently and effectively’ discharge their duties.”

Alito also discounted the potential the background information might be leaked publicly calling it a “remote possibility,” which “does not undermine the Privacy Act’s substantial protections.”

Significantly, Alito’s opinion says, “We assume, without deciding, that the Constitution protects a privacy right,” but noting, “the challenged portions of the Government’s background check do not violate this right in the present case.”

Although the wording specifically avoids flatly declaring a right to privacy, it certainly is a signal that six justices at least may be open to such a ruling. This wording is very likely to form the basis of future Supreme Court arguments, and is something for employers to consider in conducting or hiring background checks.

It was over this issue that the Court split.

Concurring in the result, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas wrote their own opinions. Both challenged Alito’s assumption of a right of privacy rooted in the Constitution. Scalia said in his opinion that “A federal constitutional right to ‘informational privacy’ does not exist.”

His is a pretty hot opinion, full of jibes at the majority view, and with language, which, for the Supreme Court, approaches intemperance: “The Court decides that the Government did not violate the right to informational privacy without deciding whether there is a right to informational privacy,and without even describing what hypothetical standard should be used to assess whether the hypothetical right has been violated.”

In another section he writes:

“Respondents claim that even though they are Government contractor employees, and even though they are working with highly expensive scientific equipment, and even though the Government is seeking only information about drug treatment and information from third  parties that is standard  in background checks, and  even though the  Government is liable for damages if that information is ever revealed, and even though NASA’s  Privacy Act regulations are very protective  of private information, NASA’s background checks are unconstitutional.   Ridiculous.”

Thomas concurred in Scalia’s opinion, adding a one paragraph opinion of his own saying the same thing.

Justice Elena Kagan did not participate in the decision.

That said, in case you might have missed Hiring the Kind of Salespeople You Only Dream About, I found John Zappe’s EEOC article a great companion. That is, if your organization routinely uses credit checking when hiring salespeople, you might want to know how the present Washington administration treats employers who don’t do their hiring homework.

(It’s OK, I’ll wait here while you catch up).

Get Ready!

We live in a confusing world where politicians are always on the lookout for reasons why their voting block is not being hired; where the government does not require organizations to hire unqualified employees; and, where adverse impact is not illegal. On the other hand, if someone thinks your organization does not have enough employees of the right color, gender, age, religion, and so forth, government agencies are empowered to be in your face!

Let’s start with an oversimplified explanation of the audit process. First, they (EEOC or OFCCP) process a complaint. Second, auditors use stats to examine your employee demographics. Third, if the stats show adverse impact, you are (on the face of the data) guilty of discrimination. The government could care less about how individual employees perform. Analysis is done at the group level. This can catch even the largest organizations flat-footed. Predictably, teams of $750/hour attorneys will be hired, everyone will argue back and forth for months, and eventually the organization $ettle$ out of court. (Note, although there are hiring exemptions extended to small business and special interest groups, best practices work for everyone).

Get Set!

The outcome of a legal challenge is unpredictable. The cost of a legal challenge is not. There are ways organizations can substantially strengthen their defense; and, the best part is, the government even tells you how to do it! Let’s say that, on the face of statistical analysis, your organization looks like a socially bankrupt, adverse-impact loving, discrimination-monger. No problem. Just show them records outlining: business necessity, job-relatedness, validation, documentation, tracking, and efforts to reduce adverse impact.

What? You don’t have them? You have a better way? Who made that decision? No matter. You’re screwed and your attorney is about to get a brand new Mercedes. You see, organizations that do not care about following best practices because their goal was filling open slots and surviving probationary periods inevitably have both weak employee bench-strength and shoddy legal credibility.

Go!

Let’s re-visit credit checking. The main reason why organizations only hire people with good credit scores is “everyone knows” they perform better. Right? Wrong? Maybe? Consider this: Low-income people usually have poor credit scores. High income people usually have better credit. But wait! Protected groups are usually low income. Knock, knock. Who is there? Audi! Audi who? Audi-tor! Open your wallet, and stop your clocks. This is going to hurt!

Unless you can document (using pencil and paper) how bad credit is directly related to job performance, you really don’t have a legal credibility (or job performance) leg to stand on. It makes as much sense as reading horoscopes and refusing to hire anyone other than a Gemini because you think he or she will give you twice the productivity.

Establishing Validity

You cannot just ask a credit report or test vendor for assurance his or her test works as promised. That’s a non-starter. Even if someone else already did all the validation work, you still have the responsibility to show your job is essentially the same as theirs … business necessity, job relatedness, and validity.

Making a strong case for credit checking as a hiring tool always starts with thoroughly understanding the job. It might be appropriate in jobs where employees or salespeople handle valuable goods or have ready access to cash. In this case, business necessity might be argued that employees with prior credit problems are more likely to steal than people with clean records.

We’re done now, right? Nope! The EEOC and OFCCP like to see something called criterion validity. That is, they want more than your opinion. They want proof that scores accurately predict job performance. This can either be present-day (concurrent validity) or future-oriented (predictive validity). Present-day validation studies compare today’s credit scores to today’s job performance. Future-oriented studies require collecting (and ignoring) credit scores, waiting long enough to get a good reading on performance, and then comparing them.

Next, we have to define job performance. In the case of salespeople who handle cash we might use shortages. Or, we might examine shrinkage if salespeople work around negotiable goods. Employees who may be tempted to give concessions or award services might require deeper investigation. Every job has different performance criteria. The golden rule is if you cannot define it, then your reason for using it becomes weaker and weaker.

Scoring

Then we have the whole issue of how we use the scores we get. Should we use low, medium, or high bands? Maybe zero to one hundred? How about pass/fail? Do we look at only a few people or a whole gaggle? Banks for example, know sample-sizes can be misleading. They analyze huge numbers of borrowers and look for trends. Why do you think they ask you how long you lived at your last address or whether you owned a home? Taken alone, these tidbits provide little data, but when combined with other factors, they give the banks enough information to evaluate the risk of lending you money. (Contrary to what the media claim, the business of banking is lending money … they just want to get it back).

Just remember, every decision has its consequences.

Make Your Own Prediction

Here’s a prediction to think about. Which of the following organizations is more likely to be considered a socially bankrupt, adverse-impact, discrimination-monger? Company A that conducts traditional interviews and hires only applicants with good credit? Or, Company B that follows best practices by showing business necessity and job relatedness, uses validated tools, keeps documentation, tracks adverse impact, and makes ongoing efforts to reduce adverse impact?

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

On the penultimate day of 2010, First Advantage was acquired by a private equity firm that also holds a sizeable chunk of Lawson Software. Symphony Technology Group, based in Palo Alto, California, bought First Advantage for $265 million in cash from owner CoreLogic.

First Advantage is involved in multiple aspects of talent acquisition, including background screening and assessments, applicant tracking technology, onboarding, and candidate sourcing and recruitment marketing.

First Advantage CEO Todd Mavis will remain.

Coincidentally, Lawson Software announced just before Christmas that it was acquiring Enwisen, a SaaS HR services provider, for $70 million, plus a contingent additional $5 million. The deal was to close last Friday.

A global ERP provider, Lawson serves multiple business sectors, including manufacturing, distribution, financial, healthcare, and others. It offers a range of HR technology from talent acquisition to workforce management, which roll up into its Lawson Strategic Human Capital Management.

Enwisen, which also has a global client list, brings a complementary set of services, adding onboarding and offboarding, a knowledge base, and HR portal to enhance Lawson’s own self-service component, and other worker usability elements. Lawson said Enwisen’s HR service delivery will become a new strategic component of the Lawson Human Capital Management System.

Kaplan Higher Education Corp. was sued Tuesday by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over its use of credit checks. The suit claims Kaplan denied jobs based on credit histories in such a way that it had a disparate impact on blacks.

The EEOC said Kaplan “engaged in a pattern or practice of unlawful discrimination by refusing to hire a class of black job applicants nationwide.”

“This practice has an unlawful discriminatory impact because of race and is neither job-related nor justified by business necessity.” The types of jobs at issue weren’t disclosed.

A company spokeswoman denied the charge, saying background checks are conducted on all potential employees. Credit checks are part of the screening for jobs involving financial matters, including advising students on financial aid.

A “disparate impact” case doesn’t require an employer to have intentionally discriminated against a class of applicants. Instead, discrimination can occur by the use of background criteria, experience, education, or other job requirements that appear neutral on their face but which more heavily impact a protected class of applicant. Unless the employer can demonstrate a “business necessity” for the requirement, it may be found guilty of discriminating. Even where business necessity can be established, a violation may still be found if there is another alternative available that is less discriminatory.

Labor lawyers and industry experts have been predicting that the EEOC is becoming more aggressive. Employment attorney Jon Hyman, who blogs at Ohio Employer’s Law Blog, warned last month that, “The EEOC is no longer an agency where charges go to die. Employers can expect more thorough investigations, quicker resolutions, and more aggressive enforcement.”

Nick Fishman, chief marketing officer, VP and co-founder of EmployeeScreenIQ, blogged about this same thing recently on ERE. In his look ahead at the background screening trends for 2011, Fishman listed the EEOC aggressiveness first, writing: “The EEOC is especially targeting ‘bright line’ hiring decisions that automatically exclude candidates with criminal records, arrest records that don’t result in a conviction, and/or poor credit.”

After reading about the Kaplan suit this morning, I called Fishman to ask about the issue and for advice about what recruiters can do to insulate their company against EEOC action.

He wasn’t surprised that the EEOC had sued someone over the issue. “They’ve become a lot more active in the last year,” he said.”We’re going to see a lot more out of them.” And, he pointed out, there is no way to protect against someone filing a lawsuit. However, no employer should be deterred from credit or background checks where the job demands it and there’s no intent to discriminate.

Fishman offered this guidance:

• Assess the exposure the company has for each job.
• Make sure there is a legitimate business purpose to conduct a credit check. Do the job responsibilities involve financial records or access to them? For a CFO position, the connection is clear. For a janitorial job, maybe not. Though there might be situations where a janitor has access by virtue of a master key to money or records.
• Have a written background policy for each position, including a description of the business purpose.
• If adverse credit information turns up, don’t automatically reject the candidate. Instead, ask about it.

Through conversations with clients and others in the industry, he has learned that employers these days are more sympathetic to credit problems. Even in the gaming industry, where many employees routinely deal with large amounts of cash, applicants with credit dings are getting more consideration than in the past, if for no other reason than credit problems are so pervasive.

Nevada, the gaming capital of the U.S., has the lowest average credit score in the nation. At 668, it’s 24 points below the national average of 692. No wonder, considering that Las Vegas has the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.

Two months ago, the EEOC held a public meeting on the use of credit histories as employment screening devices. It heard from a number of organizations including SHRM, which concluded its presentation saying, “SHRM has significant concerns with efforts to eliminate the ability of employers to consider relevant credit information during the employment process.”

Most of the speakers at the meeting represented private organizations and advocacy groups; however, the comments by Richard Tonowski may foreshadow just what the EEOC wants to see from employers using credit checks and background screening generally. Tonowski, the EEOC’s chief psychologist, summarized the day’s proceedings listing four distinct reasons why employers use credit checks.

These are:

• To identify productive employees, a use he said that has “little evidence” to back it up;
• To identify reliable employees. Conceding there is “some evidence” correlating good credit with reliability, he said, “Similar results might be obtained through personality tests or their close cousins, integrity tests.” Interestingly, these, he noted, may soon be examined by the EEOC for having a potential adverse impact on protected classes;
• To confirm employment history, which, though “a credit report can confirm basic information” the same  “might be obtained from background screening providers without the applicant’s financial details”;
• To identify those with incentive for major fraud or theft.

When used to identify potentially dishonest employees, Tonowski said, “This is perhaps the most problematic use, because — fortunately — serious crime is likely a rare event for most employers. It is thus hard to establish a predictive relationship between credit and crime.”

While hearing from the EEOC is enough to cause any HR professional to shudder, even if it decides not to proceed, private actions may be allowed. Two weeks ago the University of Miami was sued over the denial of a job to a black applicant because of a credit check.

This article addresses five questions raised in response to Part 1 of this series published last week. It addresses the best ways to assess candidate performance pre-hire and when to use references.

Question 1 — What are the most accurate indicators of past, current and future performance?

Finding accurate real world predictors of future performance is difficult but not impossible. Professional sports teams find that the best predictor of a new hire’s potential performance is their performance on the field in practice and preseason games — i.e., a work sample. Google looks at a multitude of factors that can be combined by an algorithm to successfully predict both future on-the-job performance and retention risk. The U.S. military and numerous firms in industries with extreme operational risk like airlines and chemical production facilities rely on sophisticated simulations to assess how a candidate would react in various situations.

There are literally hundreds of potential tools and approaches that can be used. Unfortunately, the vast majority of research on the subject is questionable at best.  

Rarely are academic researchers trusted to manipulate the assessment processes of organizations hiring in significant volume such that the process could provide valid data, and few if any organizations execute consistently without extreme oversight  Commercially sponsored studies are flawed in that they are executed to prove a tool or approach works, not to test the extent to which it works.

That said, most studies generally conclude, and I tend to agree, that work samples are often the best predictors. Based on my observations and learnings, I routinely recommend the following.

Most Accurate Tools for Assessing Current Performance

1. Temporary hiring — The best way to identify top performers is to hire them into the job as temporary workers, contractors, consultants, or interns. Interns often have the highest success rate among college hires because you can rely on their internship track record as a predictor of their ability to perform in your environment.
2. Actual work cases — next to “playing in the game” is assigning them a case challenge based on the real problems that the candidate would face shortly upon accepting an offer. The problem should be a real current issue, so that even if you opt not to hire the candidate, you benefit from their insight into the issue. An alternative approach that has been used by firms like Raytheon is to give them a “broken” or flawed process and ask them to find the errors and source of problems.
3. A verbal simulation — this approach takes advantage of the traditional interview time period and asks candidates to walk you through how they would tackle an actual work problem. Firms using this approach generally use a case that has already been solved (so that the interviewer/assessor is familiar with all of the relevant information the candidate may need to inquire about and knows the likely outcome of each solution step introduced).
4. Samples of current work — in roles that produce physical products, one of the best ways to assess a candidate is to assess samples of their current work. If you want to find out if a chef is any good, you taste their food. In some cases candidates may not be able to provide existing work samples from their current employer due to confidentiality issues.

Most Accurate Tools for Assessing Future Performance

1. Ask them to forecast — if you need to assess candidates’ ability to perform in the future, consider asking them to predict future opportunities and problems your industry or firm will likely face and the skills and competencies that will be required to address them successfully. Consider whether their vision aligns with or is more/less robust than yours.
2. Future work case — give the candidate a problem or opportunity that is projected to occur two years out. Ask them to “walk you through the steps” that they would take and the skills that they would need to resolve it.
3. Demonstrate leading-edge learning — the most important competency in a fast-changing world is the ability to continuously learn and stay on the leading edge of knowledge. Even if candidates and employees are successful performers today, it is unlikely they will remain top performers unless they are continuous self-directed learners. You can assess whether they have that competency by asking them specific questions about what are the leading-edge “next practices” in their area, who are the benchmark firms, the key thought leaders, and what specifically do they do every day to remain on the leading edge of knowledge.

Question 2 — When do you recommend using reference and background checks?

As I said in the first part of this article, it’s okay to use one or more reference and background checking approaches provided that you understand why you are doing so and that you have designed a process that can be consistently executed to limit exposure to the vast majority of limitations found in the typical traditional process. If you have read my stuff for a while, you will know that I look at references as future candidates, so getting current candidates to identify their network through any process is a win, even if it wasn’t the intended focus of the process.

Two good reasons that would make doing references essential:

1. A correlation with quality of hire — any time you have supporting data showing that at your company there is a positive correlation between a candidate’s on-the-job performance and retention after one year (quality of hire) and a scale-based recommendation output by your reference/background checking process.
2. When there is a legal requirement — when you are hiring for roles that require due diligence to confirm proper licensure, certification, education, etc.

Note that 99.9% of all murderers, bank robbers, and major evildoers are first-time offenders, so the fact that they haven’t done anything in their past doesn’t prevent them from future missteps. If you really believe that criminal, driving, credit, licenses, etc. are valid indicators, you need to check these elements periodically post hire to ensure that your employees maintain their initial pristine status.

Four not-so-good but still-common reasons to do them:

1. Covering your butt — the most common reason to use reference checks are to shield yourself from potential verbal lashings (after a new hire turns out to be a real turkey) by being able to say “but I checked their references.” In addition, in the almost miniscule chance that you’ll be called in a negligent hiring suit, having checked the references will get you a handful of minor points from the judge.
2. When you want a particular candidate no matter what — if the recruiter or the manager is dead-set on a particular candidate, I understand the common practice of assigning an inexperienced and positive-thinking person (overly positive people will seek out positive attributes until they find them) to do the reference checking. You can almost guarantee that they will come back with the desired “I found no problems” answer.
3. When you need another excuse to fire a bad performer — if you are reluctant to fire a bad-performing new hire, I have seen many firms purposely redo reference and background checks in the hopes that they can find a lie or omission that could be used as an excuse to terminate.
4. You yourself need job security and are a bit selfish — if your job involves doing reference checks and recruiting in general, it’s in your best interest to continue executing a time-consuming, flawed, yet accepted process. Avoiding more effective candidate assessment methodologies will ensure that a greater percentage of new hires will fail and therefore require replacement recruiting; in other words, provide job security.

Question 3 — Are reference/background checks accurate assessments of past performance?

First of all we must establish that there is little to no consistency in what is considered a reference check. I cannot say that no reference check focuses on past performance, but based on my observation of practices in place at hundreds of organizations, the vast majority come nowhere close to remotely gathering intelligence on past performance. For example, many of the following elements often focused on during a reference/background check are not indicative of performance:

• Job title
• Dates of employment
• Credit scores
• Criminal history
• Personality traits
• Attainment of a degree
• Knowledge of buzzwords
• Information relating to job performance in another era (skills and knowledge grow obsolete too!)

All performance can be quantified, but rarely would a reference checker be granted access to real records of output/productivity from another employer. While candidates could request copies of past performance appraisals, we all know that most view that process as being worse than reference checking with regard to validity!

Question 4 — Are reference checks predictors of present or future performance?

If traditional reference checks are weak ways of assessing performance and especially past performance, do they provide any insight into present or future performance potential? Again, the answer is a sad no. As typically executed the traditional, haphazardly executed reference check is not a valid indicator for the following reasons:

• The past isn’t today or tomorrow — the world has and continues to change, rendering information and skills obsolete at a fastening pace. Behaviors and actions that produced spectacular results yesterday may fail miserably if the environment changes, which we know it does.
• Your culture is different — what makes one successful in one environment will not necessarily do so in another. Top performers can easily become average performers under a new manager, and vice versa. A lot of factors influence a candidate’s ability to perform.
• They may have been bridled — a candidate with a poor “performance related reference” may have everything needed to perform in your environment, but been unable to do so in a previous environment due to lack of professional freedom, proper tools, poor management, etc.
• The individual has changed — skill and motivation levels change over the years, so how someone previously performed in a different state of mind may not be indicative of how they would perform in a different state.

Question 5 — Are the current vendor offerings in the areas of reference and background checking worth examining?

Technologies and service offerings in the HR/talent management space are evolving at a rapid pace. Many emerging offerings are not bound by the traditions and ingrained practices of the corporate world, and bring valid arguments to the table that all professionals should be aware of. The hottest tools under development today, and others that have been around for a short time, focus on providing organizations with a more comprehensive look into a candidate’s professional network. Tools leveraging a 360-type approach increase the size of the assessor pool, and thereby increase the degree of structure afforded the process and the probability that more qualitative data will emerge. I can’t say without firm specific evaluation that any tool would produce valid results in your organization, but some criteria that I would recommend using when assessing top vendors include:

• Proof — do they have proof demonstrating the correlation between reference process outcome and on-the-job performance in real client organizations that can be referenced themselves?
• Integration — do they integrate the many different checks (i.e. credit, work history, personal references, criminal, educational, license, driving, Internet etc.) into a single system?
• Metrics — do they have access to/knowledge of professional intelligence about the validity of component processes so that they can advise you using data on what practice improve/harm your candidate assessment efforts?
• Global — do they present a solution that can be used around the globe and that would not be limited in adoption by variances in culture or language? (The labor market is quickly becoming more global, so it is increasingly unrealistic to assume than a candidate’s references will come from the same region or cultural background as the candidate.)

Final thoughts

This series has introduced 30+ reasons to be wary of traditional reference checking processes, as well as a host of alternative approaches that could lead to much more accurate assessment of a candidate’s past, current, and future performance. As the EEOC increases its scrutiny and focus on this subject, everyone in the field of recruiting should learn to be cynical and test their efforts and solutions being adopted.

Anyone who’s been in the profession for more than a minute or two knows deep down that references suck as indicators.

That’s why it is a task often assigned to an unknowledgeable coordinator, outsourced, or even turned into a multiple choice online form. While there is a handful of people who swear that they do it right, the vast majority do it simply because it has always been done. Maybe reference checking is/was more accurate in smaller communities where everyone knows everyone, but for many organizations today, new hires are strangers. As we enter an era where organizations have years of data and access to sophisticated tools to better determine what does and doesn’t work as an indicator, recruiting leaders should expect more scrutiny of this process by everyone.

Government agencies and commissions that oversee equal opportunity and business dealings are paying more attention and increasingly holding organizations accountable for the actions of third-party services commissioned to carry out screening activities. If you are in a leadership role or influence someone who is, it is your professional obligation to ensure that what your organization is currently doing and plans to continue doing isn’t stupid!

The following is a long list of things that routinely plague reference checking processes broken into four categories. If you look for these weaknesses in your current approach and address them, just maybe your validity coefficient will improve.

The Top Five Most Serious Reference-checking Problems

• Few provide detailed reference information — because former employers face legal action relating to defamation, many firms have a policy restricting reference conversations to factual information such as job title, dates of employment, and possibly salary history. Questions aimed at identifying if the applicant could be rehired by a former employer often go unanswered. The end result: some candidates may benefit from robust reference profiles, while others may not depending on the stance of their former employers.
• Reference information provided on the wrong person — in larger organizations it is not uncommon for supervisors and coworkers to confuse past employees with the same/similar names, so it is possible the individual being described isn’t the individual in question.
• Historical situations may not align with present conditions — references often focus on generic aspects of job performance specific to a different environment at a different time. Even if you are able to robustly identify how someone previously acted, you can only speculate that they will act the same way today in a completely different environment. Most firms have no hard data proving that in a fast-changing world where skills and knowledge become obsolete much faster, that past performance at another firm is an accurate predictor of future performance at your firm.
• Knowledge of the applicant is limited — for a variety of reasons, the individual providing reference information may have extremely limited knowledge about the individual being referenced. For example, they may be able to confirm job responsibilities, but know nothing of actual performance if they were not the person’s actual supervisor. In large organizations, few in HR would have personal knowledge of the individual’s work history or traits.
• Records are not reviewed — unfortunately, many references (especially telephone references) are provided by former employers who are relying 100% on their memory. You can be almost 100% certain that performance appraisals or attendance records will not be reviewed prior to the reference. Not relying on records and data almost guarantees an inaccurate reference.

Problems Related to a Changing Business Environment

• Bankruptcies, mergers, and layoffs make getting references difficult — because some employers simply no longer exist, it is often impossible to contact previous employers. Large-scale layoffs might also mean that even if you find the firm, the applicant’s supervisor may no longer be there. Layoffs and lean staffs in HR may also slow responsiveness to reference requests.
• Culture and language issues complicate — because different cultures and regions have unique ways of handling references, global consistency is difficult. In addition, language issues can make some reference checking extremely problematic.
• Many have bad credit — firms that used to supplement employment reference checking with credit checks now find that so many people have credit issues stemming from bank actions that relying on past standards will cause you to lose too many candidates.
• Identity theft issues — identity theft has grown beyond credit card fraud and has entered the employment arena. Unless you take and verify fingerprints, you may be checking the references of a real person who unfortunately is not actually the person you interviewed.
• Illegal or private information is viewed — supervisors and managers all too often provide illegal or personal information that may unfortunately end up being used in the hiring decision. Reference checking that includes searching Internet or social network sites also increases the likelihood of you obtaining information that should not be part of an employment reference check.
• Resume lies are more common — in a weakened economy where individuals are desperate to get a job, it is much more likely that they will stretch the truth on their resume, application, or during the reference process. This makes it even more important to get accurate reference information beyond the resume.

Problems Related to the Person Providing The Reference Information

• Bias produces slanted references — a supervisor or coworker with a vendetta may slant the reference so that it comes out overly negative. Supervisors may provide a negative reference on a current employee in order to improve their chances of keeping them.
• A positive slant — the majority of references are positive because people try not to say bad things. But when the reference is or was a close friend or colleague who wants to help you, the odds of finding negatives drops dramatically. Personal references are even more likely to be 100% positive because the individual selects only those individuals who they know will provide a positive reference. Managers may give a glowing reference in order to get rid of a problem employee.
• Self-provided references may mislead or be fraudulent — many firms allow the applicant to provide the names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers of their references, and it should be obvious that self-selected references are more likely to give positive answers. In addition, unfortunately the names that applicants provide may not have been the person’s actual supervisor. In some cases, the number or e-mail address provided might not even belong to a real firm.
• No one is fired anymore — if you are using references to find out if someone has been previously fired from a job, you need to realize that because of legal issues, these days most individuals are allowed to resign. As a result, their employment record will not show a termination or the person will not divulge that fact.
• Leniency effect — when corporate employees do reference checking, there is a measurable tendency to be “lenient” and to downplay negative information. This leniency is caused in part because finding too much negative information will mean that the reference checker will be asked to delve deeper (more work) or that they must reopen the position search. People providing references can also be overly positive because they know that a bad reference may cost the applicant (who may also be a friend) their next job.
• Competitor firms will not cooperate — in a highly competitive business world, it can be increasingly difficult to get any form of information from a major product or talent competitor.

Administrative Problems With the Reference Checking Process

• No company data to prove they work — because many firms execute their own reference-checking process, it would be a mistake to rely on external research to prove the accuracy of the process. Unfortunately, I have never come across an organization that routinely gathers and analyzes data on the predictive accuracy of their reference process.
• Reliability is low — most corporate reference-checking processes (unlike vendor processes) are loosely designed and poorly controlled. Moreover, when reference checking is decentralized and many untrained individuals are conducting them, the execution (consistency and reliability of the process) slips even further.
• The person doing the checks are weak — many times the employees who are given the assignment are not trained in reference checking or knowledgeable about the organization or job specifics, making it difficult for them to dive deeply into relevant matters.
• References are often not completed until after the time of hire — due to the cost and time involved, some firms now complete reference checks after the individual is already on the job.
• Lawsuits are real — final hiring decisions are made based on reference-checking results, and in a down economy, more rejected candidates resort to legal remedies. Unfortunately, during legal discovery you may find that your references have a sudden memory loss and they will not repeat what they initially said, leaving you in legal jeopardy (which is why written references are superior, even though they are slower). In direct contrast, failing to check references may result in the possibility of negligent hiring claims.
• Reference checking is slow — in order to get documentation, it is important to use written references. However, written references take much longer, and a higher percentage of individuals are reluctant to participate in references when they must provide their signature. Reference checking is often not a high priority among recruiters or support staff even though slow reference checking may cause you to lose top candidates.
• The use of leading questions — a significant percentage of the reference questions that I encounter are binary questions pertaining to positive traits that almost always elicit positive answers. Requiring the individual to force rank or pick from a list of both positive and negative answers is a superior approach. Open-ended questions result in different information, making comparisons between candidates difficult.
• Poor documentation — telephone references often suffer from poor documentation and capture no signatures, which can be a problem should legal issues arise.
• Automated reference-checking limits depth — web-based reference-gathering systems shift the burden of getting references to the candidate, added work that may cause some candidates to drop out. In addition, to make such tools possible, the scope of the reference is limited and the ability to dive deeper into specific responses is virtually non-existent.
• The same process for all jobs — even though some jobs demand much more thorough reference checking (i.e. those who handle money, those with childcare responsibilities, etc.) most corporations use the same exact process for all jobs.
• A checklist is not used — rather than using a checklist of standard questions, many supervisors who check references “wing it” or make up their reference questions as they go, resulting in no consistency. If standard questions are used, they are often not weighted based on their relative importance in predicting future job performance.
• Mixed results make comparisons and conclusions difficult — the more references you check and the further back you go, you increase the likelihood that you will be faced with mixed references. Also, because an individual may receive several glowing and one extremely negative reference, making a decision based on consistent results may be difficult. When candidate slates include those recently out of school with little or no experience, managers are forced to make difficult comparisons between candidates with business experience and those who only have school related references.
• All references shouldn’t receive equal weight — older references should be given a lower weight because the further back you go in a candidate’s work history, the less likely that the results will be valid predictors.
• No permission signature is obtained — if you are using resumes instead of application forms, you may be checking references without written authorization. If you inadvertently call their current employer, you may get them fired, which could lead to them taking action against you.
• It is not a continuous process — most references are done exclusively during the hiring process, but criminal, motor vehicle, or credit issues could occur well after the individual has been hired.
• Inclusion requires flexibility — if your recruiting or diversity goals include attracting individuals from lower-income groups, it is important to realize that some of these individuals may be more likely to have criminal, driving, credit, or job-jumping issues that can result in weaker overall reference scores.
• Contingent workers are treated differently — some organizations fail to require reference checks or allow vendors to use less stringent processes for temporary, part-time, and contract labor. As contingent workers become a larger percentage of a firm’s total labor, this inconsistency will need to end.

A new company called “Social Intelligence” says it’ll “track the worldwide network of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, individual blogs, and thousands of other sources.”

Social Intelligence will, within 24-48 hours, produce a report on a job candidate using both automation as well as humans, the latter there to make sure there aren’t “false positives.” It says it will weed out “protected class” information it finds, such as race and religion. The company is also offering a version to monitor what existing employees are up to.

As far as the hiring version, a screenshot, which you can click on to enlarge, shows that the employee profile screens for such things as: ”Gangs,” “Drugs/drug lingo,” “demonstrating potentially violent behavior,” and “poor judgment” — something we could all agree can be found in ample supply on social media.

I asked the company’s CEO, Max Drucker, whether this judgment thing is kind of subjective. “We err on the side of not flagging something,” he says, adding that “serious red-flag issues” are what they’re really looking for. He also notes that the firm has three people review information before the profile’s done. So, “Todd beat Sean in the 600-meter dash” shouldn’t show up as a Todd-beats-people flag. I hope.

Nick Fishman, the co-founder of EmployeeScreenIQ, doesn’t envision his or other similar companies going down the social-media background-checking road. “Not only are they not now, but I don’t foresee getting into it in the future,” he says. “It’s a hornet’s nest.” Awaiting employers in that nest, he says, are FCRA regulations and EEO rules.

But Drucker, from Social Intelligence, says that “what we do is protect the employee from discrimination, and protect the employer from allegations of discrimination.” He notes that “if the employer is freaked out by the risks” of background checks and skips them, then they may end up liable for being negligent in the hiring process.

Robert Pickell, who’s the senior vice president of customer solutions at HireRight, says that he expects to see a lawsuit like that before long: a workplace violence or similar episode will happen, and someone will argue that the employer should have found information on social media indicating that the employee was dangerous.

HireRight has been talking to customers about the social-media-background-checking convergence for three or four years. The company has yet to plunge into it, though, saying there just isn’t demand, and the pitfalls are too great.

In the comment section, I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this.

For these purposes online, I’m just going to tackle the fourth part — your options for handling federal and state legislation in flux.

Well, not just in flux but, it appears that both state and federal law is trending toward less access to consumer reports. Taking these changes into account, what can employers do to minimize their liability while still gaining access to credit information regarding current or prospective employees when necessary? The answer most likely involves the state and federal statutory definitions of “consumer reports” and “consumer reporting agency.”

The proposed federal changes, as well as proposed Oregon and Washington statutes, are only triggered when an employer obtains a report from a consumer reporting agency, generally defined as an entity that compiles consumer credit or other background information and provides consumer reports to third parties. If the employer itself obtains information regarding an individual’s credit history, these statutes are not triggered.

Although not as detailed as the information that a consumer reporting agency provides, an employer could still search for and obtain public court records for judgments entered against an individual.

While not as comprehensive, if not downright clunky, this is information that could provide similar information to a credit report. It would show, for example, whether any judgments have been entered against the individual for outstanding debts. An individual with a poor credit history may very likely have judgments against them in favor of one or more creditors. To the extent an individual’s failure to pay his or her debts is important to the employer, taking the time to search for judgments against a particular individual may provide the necessary information without running afoul of credit-check regulations.

Employers conducting their own searches must be careful, however, of the restrictions of the Bankruptcy Code, which prohibit an employer from terminating or otherwise discriminating against an employee solely on the basis of a bankruptcy filing. For this reason, employers seeking to avoid the pitfalls of the proposed FCRA amendments and state statutes restricting the use of credit information with respect to certain positions should also avoid making any decision based on public bankruptcy filings. It is worth noting, however, that a recent case from the Western District of Pennsylvania held that the Bankruptcy Code’s discrimination provision does not apply to decisions made regarding prospective, not current, employees.

1. You shred the resume and delete it from your ATS
2. You make up a reason why she’s unqualified
3. You look up the classifieds in Soldier of Fortune magazine
4. You decide to interview her anyway

If you picked #4, you’d be in the minority.

In a recent survey by Microsoft 84 percent of U.S. recruiters think it is proper to consider personal data posted online when evaluating a candidate and do online research using search engines, social networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter, online-gaming sites, and even classifieds, and auction sites like Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc. What they expect to find in that last category is a mystery, but I guess you never know. Now whether all this “research” does anything to improve the quality of hires, or it’s just an excuse for voyeurism, is something we’ll likely never know. The survey doesn’t address results or even ask about the respondent’s perception of results.

Sauce for the Goose

If the survey numbers are true, then thousands of hiring decisions are being made based on information that may or may not be valid, from sources that may or may not be reliable, and using criteria that may or may not be relevant to hiring. What could go wrong? The Shirely Sherrod case that has been in the news is a perfect illustration of what can happen when an employment decision is made without understanding the context or the credibility of the source. And that involved dozens of people up to the level of the White House.

The survey mentions that concerns about lifestyle, inappropriate comments, and unsuitable photos and videos top the list of reasons that those surveyed give for rejecting a candidate. Well, since these criteria are so well defined with no possibility for ambiguity, it must be all right to use them. But recruiters also rejected applicants because of inappropriate comments by friends, family, and colleagues. So it’s acceptable to reject candidates based on gossip?

Relying on online information in a hiring decision can cut both ways. Already, services like Reputation Defender are offering to clean up people’s online reputations by bombarding the web with positive information about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search. What’s to stop candidates from creating largely fake online personas when they know that recruiters put so much weight on information they find online? Almost half of the recruiters in the Microsoft survey said that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to a great extent.

Be Careful What You Wish For

The danger for employers is that continuing to make hiring decisions based on data collected online will generate a legislative backlash. Several states –New York, California, and Colorado — already prohibit employers from taking any employment related actions based on legal off-duty conduct. It’s not a reach to see those provisions being extended to hiring decisions. And Congress may get in on the act. In times like these when jobs are scarce, an issue like this can garner plenty of bipartisan support. And that could be a disaster, since laws made in response to populist anger will likely make life difficult. For starters, they would impose very onerous reporting burdens on employers.

Some would argue that any such laws would be difficult to enforce, since a lot of this kind of research on candidates can be done anonymously. But that’s not quite true. Digital forensics is the fastest growing field in the legal profession, and the tools to discover where someone’s been online are getting very sophisticated.

The bigger issue: what’s the value being gained from all this online research? Few, if any, employers have specific policies and rules about how to interpret online information. Unlike information obtained from background checks, which is highly structured and obtained from very credible sources, virtually everything seen online is unstructured and from sources of unknown credibility. Ninety percent of respondents in the Microsoft survey claimed that they take steps to corroborate the authenticity of information they collect online. How exactly does one do that? If they see a picture of a candidate holding a glass of what appears to be beer do they track down the others in the picture and ask if the candidate is routinely drunk?

It appears that much of this activity is done because it’s possible, not because it results in better quality hires. It gives the appearance of having done a good job in evaluating a candidate when there’s no evidence that it makes any difference at all. There are examples of some employer that avoided making a genuinely bad hire because of something discovered online, but those stories don’t establish that aimless trolling for information improves the hiring process.

Interestingly among the survey respondents almost 90% of male recruiters check out candidates online, compared to only about 60% of female recruiters. So maybe it is about voyeurism and not hires. But recruiters are hard-working people, who often get little respect and appreciation. Who’s to deny them some fun?

In direct contrast, other major business process owners use a “data or evidence-driven” approach to determine not just whether a process is producing the desirable results but also to determine precisely at what step are the failures occurring. If you’re ready to shift to a more businesslike and data-driven approach that can help you pinpoint the “failure points” in your recruiting process, this article will outline what you need to do.

FPI (Failure Point Identification) — a process for identifying recruiting failure points

The technical term within the field of process reengineering for identifying the specific causes of process failure is “failure analysis” and when a significant percentage of a processes errors occur at a single stage or step, that is known as a “failure point.” As a result, I call the process that I have developed for identifying the weak stages of a recruiting process “Recruiting Failure Point Identification” or “Recruiting FPI.” Rather than trying to completely rebuild the whole recruiting process, the FPI approach helps you identify the steps that are contributing the most to poor results. In fact, it’s quite possible that the majority of your recruiting shortfall is occurring as a result of weaknesses in one or two, out of a dozen recruiting process steps. Unless you can accurately identify these failure points, you run the risk of wasting significant amounts of money and time fixing the wrong step. And by not accurately identifying and fixing these key failure points, you may be dooming your recruiting process to a long future of continuously disappointing results. There are three broad categories of approaches that corporations can use in order to identify the key failure points in any hiring process.

The three basic FPI approaches include:

1. Evaluating the steps in the recruiting process — in order to find failure points, locate the deluded individual step to determine if it is even being carried out, who is accountable for it, and whether there are  metrics for assessing the output of that step. I covered that approach in a related article.
2. Using a yield model to identify failure points — this approach identifies failure points by measuring the yields or the volume remaining after each step. For example, if at the interview step it takes 10 interviews to yield one offer (or a 10% pass-through rate) you know you have a quality issue when the normal pass through is 20%. Whenever the process manager encounters a significant decrease from the average expected pass through percentage at a step, they must take notice and analyze that step. I covered that approach in a related article.
3. Alternative approaches for identifying failure points — this last category includes two dozen alternative approaches that you can use to supplement the “step approach” and “the yield model.” In this article I’ll cover those remaining approaches that can be used for identifying failure points in the recruiting process. I have purposely provided “too many” approaches so that you’re not forced to select an approach that you are not comfortable with.

A list of alternative approaches (categorized by recruiting step)

Each of the major alternative approaches for identifying failure points are bullet-pointed here under the most relevant step in the recruiting process.

Step 1: The application classification step — is the problem originating here?

• Submit “perfect” resumes for screening — if you suspect your problem is occurring at the resume receiving or sorting step, you can test the effectiveness of this screening step by using dummy “perfect resumes.” By taking each of the critical job requirements and placing them into newly created résumés, you can in effect create a “perfect resume” that perfectly fits every requirement of the job. By submitting a variety of these “perfect” resumes under different names you can identify which percentage are actually received and are then classified as “qualified” (i.e. passed along for a phone screen). The percentage of these perfect resumes that should receive a phone screen should be close to 100%, and if it’s not, you will know right away if you have a screening problem (one firm found that 82% of their perfect resumes never made it to step two). Another alternative is to disguise the resumes of your own top employees and submit them to see what percentage of your own top employees would be rated highly by your own screening process (one firm found only two out of five of their top employees would receive an interview if they applied under another name). You can also include some clearly unqualified candidates to see if any (unfortunately) make it through to the phone screening process.
• A comparison classification of the applications — have one or more of your technical employees independently classify a large group of applications/resumes into qualified and unqualified categories. Then compare those results with those from the original classification done by the recruiter to see where the recruiter made mistakes in assessing unqualified applicants to be qualified and vice versa. You can also hire an external agency recruiter to do a similar comparison assessment.
• Use mystery applicants — one of the best ways to identify where problems are occurring in any customer setting is to use mystery shoppers. A similar approach, using anonymous applicants can be an extremely valuable tool for identifying process problems. This process (users have included DaVita and Publix Markets) allows you to hire trained customer service professionals to become applicants in order to assess first-hand at least the early phases of the application and recruiting process. The mystery applicant works best for high-volume jobs that don’t require a high level of professional level knowledge.

Step 2: Sorting applications into the right jobs — is the problem originating here?

• A comparison sort — have one or more of your technical employees independently sort a large group of received applications into what they consider to be the most appropriate open requisition. Then compare that job sort with the same sort that was originally done by the recruiter to see where the recruiter made mistakes in putting the wrong applicant with the wrong job.

Step 3: The phone screen step — is the problem originating here?

• Add professional assessors to the phone screen list — if you are concerned that problems are occurring during the phone screen or during the reference-checking steps, you can check the effectiveness of the process by using trained assessors. Start by periodically inserting the names of trained assessors among the real names to call for phone screens or reference checks. These assessors can take notes and use a checklist to identify potential problems with the phone screening or reference-checking process. Incidentally, just letting your screeners know in advance that a professional assessor may be on the other end of the phone line might by itself significantly improve their performance.

Step 4: The interview step — is the problem originating here?

• Survey candidates about the interview process — one of the best ways to identify problems with the interview is to survey a small sample of the applicants who participated in the interview process. Use a simple e-mail survey after the job has closed and ask them to identify problems that they saw and things that they would improve.
• Survey managers and recruiters about the interview process — survey a small sample of the hiring managers and recruiters after the job has closed and ask them to rate the overall effectiveness of the process on a 1 to 10 scale. Also ask them to identify problems that they saw and things that they would improve.
• Have HR professionals participate — periodically have an HR professional sit in on a random sample of interviews in order to identify what’s working and what isn’t.

Step 5: The offer step — is the problem originating here?

• Survey those who rejected our offer — identify problems with the offer process by surveying each of the applicants who turned down our job offer. Use a simple e-mail survey after the job has closed and ask them to identify problems that they saw with their offer and the process as well as things that they would improve. You might want to delay the survey for several months in order to improve the honesty of the answers.
• Survey new hires — during the onboarding process, survey all of your new hires. Ask them about the positive and negative aspects of the offer process, the interview process, and the overall candidate experience. Because they now work for you, they are much more likely to provide honest feedback so that the firm will be better able to recruit effective coworkers for them in the future.
• Survey managers and recruiters about the offer process — survey a small sample of the hiring managers and recruiters after the job has closed and ask them to rate the effectiveness of the offer process on a 1 to 10 scale. Also ask them to identify problems that they saw and things that they would improve about the offer process.

Other Miscellaneous Approaches for Identifying Failure Points

Some additional approaches to consider include:

1. Identify the dropout point of high quality applicants who you “didn’t hire” — nothing demonstrates failure more prominently than having a process that rejects or somehow loses the very best quality candidates. To check to see if you’re losing top quality candidates, periodically take one or two high-priority jobs. After the position has closed, compile all of the resumes of individuals who were not hired. Identify any of these individuals who would be classified as “high-quality” candidates and identify at which step that they dropped out or at which step you dropped them. Any step where you are losing more than one high-quality candidate must be further analyzed. By the way, if more than 10% of your “didn’t hires” (or whatever number you determine to be appropriate) are rated as high-quality candidates, you must assume that your overall recruiting process is failing.
2. Identify the dropout point of diverse applicants you didn’t hire — periodically take one or two high-priority jobs and after the position has closed, compile all of the resumes from diverse individuals who were not hired. Identify any of these diverse individuals who would be classified as high-quality candidates and find out at which step that they dropped out or you dropped them. The steps where we are losing any high-quality diversity candidates must be further analyzed.
3. Force-rank all applications and see what happened to them — select one or two high-priority jobs and have a hiring manager rank them and number each one from best to worst. Keep the numbers secret until the end of the hiring process. Then see if the person that you actually hired was in the top 10% of the initial ranking. Next, check to see at what step of the hiring process that you lost the remaining top ten percent of all applicants. If a significant percentage are lost in a single step, consider that step to be a main failure point.
4. Ask them to rate each step — give a small sample of applicants a rating sheet and ask them to rate the effectiveness of each step immediately after it is completed during their hiring process. Promise to keep their evaluation anonymous (or don’t open it until after the hiring process is over), in order to minimize any fear they may have of retribution.
5. Identify their frustration points — survey applicants and new hires in order to identify their relative frustration level at each of the steps in the hiring process. Even if their frustrations didn’t cause them to drop out at any step, it’s important to limit their frustration wherever possible.
6. Implement a complaint process — implement an anonymous web-based complaint process that allows applicants to anonymously make comments or to complain about each individual step, as well as the overall process. Then track the number and the seriousness of the complaints at each step, in order to identify the step where the most serious problems are occurring.
7. Survey them three months later — due a follow-up survey of applicants long after they have been rejected in order to see if after a long delay, they are more honest about problems that they encountered.
8. Use external experts -– hire an external recruiting expert to sit through the different steps of the process over several different hires. Use their assessment to identify which steps contain the most problems.
9. Force the step’s owner to periodically conduct an audit -– require the process owner of each major step of the recruiting process to develop an audit checklist, which covers all of the potential major problems that are likely to occur. Require them to periodically do a self-assessment or audit, so that they can continually improve.
10. Use common staffing metrics -– monitor common recruiting metrics like time-to-fill as warning signs. Look at the time that each recruiting step actually takes, and compare it to the expectation.
11. Focus on typical problems — overall, my research indicates that the root causes of most recruiting process problems come from the top of the funnel, as a result of poor sourcing. As a result, if you’re unsure, I recommend that you focus on sourcing problems first, such as over-utilizing sources that contain primarily active candidates, having no direct sourcing, and having a weak referral program.
12. Look for patterns — many recruiting leaders find that the same recruiting problems periodically return. As a result, try to identify these patterns so that you can use them to identify the most probable steps where problems are likely to return.
13. Benchmark other firms — you might find that other firms of a similar size in the same industry have already identified common problem steps. Although they might not be exactly the same, they might be a good indicator as to where to look further. Even if each step in your process is meeting your expectations, it might help to compare your level of expected results against other firms to see if your expectations are too low.
14. Calculate the cost of a bad hire — calculate the value difference in revenue between a great hire and a bad hire in the same position. Use that dollar amount to motivate everyone to continually improve not just the step that they own but also recruiting the overall process as well.

Final Thoughts

I’ve attempted in this series (see the first and second) of articles to highlight the importance of looking beyond the simple question of “is the recruiting process meeting its goals?” and to develop a process for identifying failure points at each step in your recruiting process. Unfortunately, most recruiting leaders have no formal process for pinpointing their problems.

As a result, I have also provided a long list of failure point identification tools and approaches that I have found to be helpful to me when I’ve been asked to audit a corporate recruiting process. Of course, every organization needs to select the tools that best fit their needs and their culture but the key learning is to have in place a formal process for periodically identifying specifically where your process is failing. This might require you to become a CSI-type investigator but at least you now have a long list of tools that you can use to quickly and accurately pinpoint though your problem steps.

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. The dreaded employee referral?
2. Internet background checks on prospective hires
3. Being yourself and why it works
4. Is the 6.2% payroll tax incentive helping to hire more unemployed people?
5. How recruiters should respond to a vague sales manager
6. Featured group of the week: New England recruiters

1. The dreaded employee referral?

Simon Meth writes: “Popular opinion is that employee referrals are the #1 source of hire in a corporate environment. I believe that to be true. But are employee referrals the #1 source of quality hires? I doubt it! Following are some thoughts from my own experience. Your mileage may vary.

Can employee referrals backfire? Are they the number one source of quality hires?

2. Internet background checks on prospective hires

A community member asks, “Are any of you on the corporate or in-house recruitment side doing routine Internet searches on prospective candidates or new hires? If so, do you have legal counsel support for it? And, how is it going? I have been tasked by the VP of HR at my site to look into this. I have consulted two attorneys — their opinion is that its okay to do but know that the info is not reliable and should not be used for a go/no go decision. Our third party background check company won’t touch it either. I’m interested to know if any of you out there are doing it and if so, what kind of results are you getting?

Do you do Internet background checks? Let this member know in the forum.

3. Being yourself and why it works

Matthew Hakaim writes, “My ‘perfect world’ had just crumbled in a matter of seconds. I was faced with the need to find new work, and I had no clue what I wanted to do. A few weeks later I was introduced to a guy who owned a recruiting company that specialized in finding talent for the video game industry. After a few short conversations I had accepted a job at their firm as a recruiter. There was a slight hurdle to overcome though. I was not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination and I really had no clue what a recruiter was.

I like the simple message: be yourself and life will be a lot easier!

4. Is the 6.2% payroll tax incentive helping to hire more unemployed people?

Maureen Sharib posted some interesting information in the Compensation and Benefits group: “Employers who hire unemployed workers this year (after Feb. 3, 2010 and before Jan. 1, 2011) may qualify for a 6.2-percent payroll tax incentive, in effect exempting them from their share of Social Security taxes on wages paid to these workers after March 18, 2010. More here.

I have to wonder if these incentives will actually help employ more unemployed people. Is this the start to recruiters preferring active candidates over passive ones?

5. How recruiters should respond to a vague sales manager

Lee Salz started an interesting conversation in the Ask the Sales Hiring Expert group: “Sales managers are infamous for asking recruiters to find “great sales people.” Yet, that isn’t enough information to surface the right candidates. What should recruiters do so they don’t waste time spinning their wheels?

What’s the best way to nail down criteria for sales people from sales managers?

6. Featured group of the week: New England recruiters

The New England recruiters group is a networking group based around the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. While it has been dormant for some time, we’ve started to revitalize the community through some discussions and e-mails about where to take the group. Take a look at our most recent discussion about using Facebook as a recruiting tool or join up and start your own discussion!

To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. The only danger in mobile recruiting?
2. Is your recruiting quaint?
3. Talent acquisition metrics
4. The big disconnect
5. Whose responsibility is it to check references?
6. Featured group of the week: Recruiting leadership forum

1. The danger of mobile recruiting? Not doing it.

Kristine Rhodes writes “Recently, I asked my client partners why they declined using mobile marketing as part of their recruiting strategy in 2009. I heard everything from “It’s just hype,” to “It’s intrusive,” to my personal favorite “It’s dangerous.” So I thought I’d share some quick facts to dispel the myths, and provide a few ways to ease into a mobile strategy.

Are you trying to get mobile recruiting initiatives completed this year? Take a look at Kristine’s post and add your own comments.

2. Is your recruiting quaint?

Kristen Fife argues that having a tool that only works in one type of browser sends the wrong message. She states: “It’s 2010, guys. I live in Microsoft’s backyard and a good number of the people *I* know use Firefox at home and work. Not to mention Chrome. And Safari (hellooooooooo, remember the new iPad that was unveiled a few weeks ago?) as well as a host of smaller browsers such as Flock, Opera, etc.

Is making an application cross-browser compatible not realistic or is it necessary in a multiple browser world?

3. Talent acquisition metrics

Ritvik Bhawan outlays the different types of metrics a person should use if they are looking to track their progress. He breaks them down into three categories:

• Workforce planning and acquisition strategy
• Applicant sourcing and candidate management
• Applicant tracking and final joining

Take a look and see if any of your favorite metrics are left out.

4. The big disconnect: how recruiters earn their fee

Barbara Goldman tells a story about how she worked behind the scenes as a third-party recruiter to secure a candidate in a way that the client didn’t see. She writes, “After my candidate started, and I called to collect my fee, the president of the company asked me how I had persuaded him to even interview. You see, unknown to me, he was a target candidate for the company. They knew him. Three recruiters had tried to drag him in. He said no. Now, they finally got their man.

What are your thoughts? Is a third-party recruiter’s value disguised?

5. Whose responsibility is it to check candidate references?

A member of the independent recruiters group on ERE asks: “I am preparing to enter the field as a contingent fee recruiter specializing in health care, and I have a couple of burning questions. [Whose] responsibility is it to verify a candidate’s references? Would not the employer always want to do this for themselves even if you do it? My other question is how should this issue be  handled (worded) in my contract?

Got some feedback for him? Leave a comment for him in the group.

6. Featured group: Recruiting leadership forum

The recruiting leadership forum was created by John DePolo and the objective of the group is to “share best practices in recruiting leadership with members, and brainstorming new ideas that will help companies improve their processes.” A couple recent posts include how people are approaching the hiring of former prisoners and non-employee referral programs. Are you a leader in recruiting? Check this group out.

To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.

Personality Assessments
I have always been suspicious of self-rated assessments, as candidates know the job they are interviewing for and can guess what to say or not say. Many studies, such as the one recently published in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment (They Don’t Do It Often, But They Do It Well: Exploring the relationship between applicant mental abilities and faking, Julia Levashina, Frederick P. Morgeson and Michael A. Campion), have shown that self-assessments are indeed faulty:

This research [on fake personality measures] consistently demonstrates that candidates are able to fake personality measures by recognizing the correct, job-related, or preferred answers, and artificially inflate their scores.

Scary, right? Well, it depends on who is doing the cheating. Many candidates who have gone without a job for six months or more will tell you that it is good to know how to play the system in order to get a job.

Biodata Assessments
Some organizations may agree that personality tests can be faked, yet still believe in the strength of their biodata assessment. Are they correct in doing so?

First, what is biodata? Biodata is a commonly used term in industrial and organizational psychology for biographical data. Biodata is defined as “… factual kinds of questions about life and work experiences, as well as to items involving opinions, values, beliefs, and attitudes that reflect a historical perspective.” The basis of biodata’s predictive abilities is the axiom that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

Biodata has an advantage over personality or even interest inventories, as it tells you the past behavior of a person, and from there it can predict one’s future actions … assuming one tells the truth!

How Many Cheat?
A newly released study from Julia Levashina, Frederick P. Morgeson, and Michael A. Campion on real candidates in real job application situations will give us the answer.

And this is a serious study, as 17,368 applications were analyzed across many different job categories (general management, economic and political analysis, public relations, etc.) with an innovative but strong way to detect the fake. Also, it is important to note that “candidates were warned that their responses could be verified and that any attempts to falsify information could be used as a basis for not employing them.” Thus, it was not a laboratory experiment.

So, how many are fakes? How many among those 17,368 applicants were trying to fake their way in?

The researchers divided the applicants into three groups, which we have taken the freedom to name:

Complete liars: 173 candidates (1%)
Fakers: 1,389 candidates (8%)
Stretchers: 4,168 (24%)

In short, a third of the people you will see will pretend to have done many more things than they actually have. In practice it could look like this:

These examples look obvious, and are for the sake of fun and illustrating the point, but they are probably what you can read on a resume or hear during an interview. Some strategies can help you uncover the hoax. We will cover them at the end. But the question still remains: Does cheating work?

Does Cheating Work?

Statements used in the research assessments were not as obvious; they were experiences or behaviors important to successful job performance. These included interactions with others, adaptability, initiative or persistence, leadership. These are less easy to fake. For instance, when you first move into a new place, how much time do you spend exploring your new surroundings (5 = a great deal of time; 1 = very little time)? They were capable of cheating, but how well did that work in favor of the fakers?

The research on this is clear: all groups of fakers “obtained higher scores on the biodata measure.”

Interestingly, the research showed that people with higher levels of mental abilities fake less often, but when they do it they get significantly higher scores. In short, the clever fakers are the ones benefiting the most.

So, we can safely predict that once job seekers learn that stretching the truth on applications and interviews works in their favor, they will continue to do it more. Thus, if today we see one in three people stretching the truth, tomorrow we may see one in two.

Talent Acquisition Response

Of course I/O psychologists will combat these statements by saying that they use empirical rating versus rational rating procedures. In short, more is not always best and other techniques prevent the fakers from winning. Incorporating other testing strategies should therefore be the first step, but it’s best to not take a chance, so I advise complementing such techniques with the following three simple and cheap strategies:

1. For verifiable facts (i.e. Harvard MBA) perform a verification (academic, employment, etc). Not only will you avoid a bad hire, but you’ll prevent potential brand erosion and embarrassment.
2. For results or behaviors that require one to have expertise (i.e. “recoded and secured the whole encryption software”), if straight technical assessments aren’t possible, make sure that a technical person (on your staff or outside if it is very unique) is part of the interview team to cross check the candidate to validate the expertise. At a minimum, a telephone interview or video conferencing should be performed if a face-to-face meeting is not possible.
3. For results or behaviors where you can learn the jargon quickly (i.e. manage the on-time on-budget new ATS implementation), I recommend colleagues rate the candidate and or perform a reference check 2.0. These can be used as well for the previous section if you question the achievement level or the personality fit of a candidate, as technical competence is not always synonymous with performance and integration.

Armed with these tools, the next time you have three finalists in front of you, you will have the certainty of not picking the fake one.

employeescreenIQ says it found “an alarming 57 percent of requests for employment and education verifications were rejected when an electronically signed consent form was used.” The company, one of the largest global screening firms, conducts hundreds of thousands of these verifications for companies of all sizes, including several on the Fortune 500 list. In the majority of screens, the former employer or academic institution insists on first getting a copy of the subject’s signature.

Schools rejected electronic signatures 59 percent of the time, while employers were only slightly better, rejecting them 55 percent of the time.

“We find that most employers and academic institutions still want to see an actual signature before releasing information,” employeescreenIQ’s Vice President of Quality Service, Kevin Bachman, says in the announcement the company issued today. “If an HR manager can’t get the information they need to make a hiring decision, there’s the likelihood they could simply move onto another candidate.”

When we spoke with Bachman he told us there have been instances where a school requires a consent form be mailed and the verification results mailed back. But even faxing back a consent form plays havoc with the 24 hour turnaround time many employers have come to expect. employeescreenIQ advises its clients who absolutely, positively can not wait to obtain a handwritten signature on a consent form at the same time their prospect provides an electronic one.

We thought it odd that a faxed form was considered more reliable than an electronic signature, but Bachman says, “We are all conditioned to accept the scribble.”

Congress sought to change that in 1999 when it directed federal agencies to accept electronic signatures on the same terms  they did handwritten (wet) signatures. A year later Congress passed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act validating the use of electronic signatures for contracts and other legal documents in interstate commerce. Most states have followed suit. However, consumers can still insist on providing handwritten signatures, and the law doesn’t bar a firm from requiring a wet signature.

The acceptance of electronic signatures in HR is about on a par with the adoption of electronic signatures as part of electronic contracting. The International Association for Contract & Commercial Management found in 2007 that significantly less than the 45 percent of the surveyed firms which had adopted electronic contracting also accepted electronic signatures. Technology and software firms had the highest rate (45 percent), while none of the life sciences firms in the survey used electronic signatures for their contracts.

ATS vendors have also found clients having to scan in handwritten consent forms.

In the employeescreenIQ press release, ATS vendor iCIMS says it hasn’t seen any particular demand for e-signature capture and use. Instead, the press release quotes Susan Vitale, iCIMS director of marketing, saying:

“While we are open to pursuing more advanced E-Signature technologies, many of our clients are not demanding these alternatives. Instead, they are looking for printing, signing, and scanning capabilities, which we do offer today. Our platform allows for one-click access to view electronic iForms, such as background checks, in a Word version, which can then be printed hard-copy, signed off on, and then scanned back into the system very easily. While this is not necessarily optimizing the automation process, customers who pursue this route are typically less concerned with full automation and more concerned with viewing a ‘real’ signature.”

Listen here

A New York City law firm filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claiming Madison Square Garden discriminates against African-American job applicants by illegally using criminal history reports in making hiring decisions.

The EEOC complaint alleges that Carlene Clarke, 27, received an employment offer letter from New York’s Madison Square Garden in September 2007 which was rescinded a month later after a background check discovered she had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault more than five years earlier.

According to the press release issued by Outten & Golden LLP, which represents Clarke, the rationale for the complaint is that “use of criminal histories in making hiring and other employment decisions has a disparate impact on African-Americans.”

Outten & Golden attorney Justin M. Swartz said, “The fact is, about one in five U.S. adults has a criminal record, and a disproportionate number of them are African-Americans and Hispanics.”

An MSG official declined to discuss the complaint, but emailed us a statement saying, “Ms. Clarke pleaded guilty to assault. We conduct criminal background checks in order to ensure the safety of our fans and employees. This policy is not discriminatory.”

New York is one of only a handful of states that has laws specifically limiting an employer’s ability to exclude job-seekers with a criminal record. Federal courts have also extended Civil Rights Act protection to minorities with criminal records, requiring in the case of convictions for an employer to consider the passage of time, the nature of the crime, and its relationship to the position.

Whether or not Clarke’s complaint is upheld, Brian Poe, founder and CEO of ClearMyRecord.com, said the use of background checks to disqualify job candidates and dismiss current employees has become so widespread that it may be time for Congress to enact a Fair Criminal Record Reporting Act.

“A criminal record shouldn’t be a life sentence,” Poe told us. But with electronic databases that now routinely reach back to the sixties and even earlier, “something you did 20 years ago will hurt you today,” he adds.

Poe founded ClearMyRecord.com in 1999 to help individuals remove or seal criminal and arrest records and get mention of them removed from electronic databases. The site won’t help people whose arrest involved a sex charge or a minor, but it has helped thousands of others, including, the company reports, one person who won a presidential pardon this year.

Poe says his clients aren’t hardcore or career criminals, since states won’t permit them to clean their records. Most, he said, are minor offenders who made a mistake.

Typical, said Poe, is the case of a former police officer who was arrested for writing bad checks 18 years ago during a nasty divorce. The arrest has prevented the man’s hiring by other departments despite a clean record and steady employment in private security.

In another case, a career postal worker was fired after a periodic background check turned up his 1962 conviction for assault in connection with a Texas bar brawl.

It doesn’t take a felony or even a conviction to give someone a record. “These companies,” Poe said, referring to database firms that buy criminal and arrest records directly from the nation’s 50 states and 3,100 counties, “get all the records then resell them to smaller companies. Employers use these services and don’t (distinguish between) an arrest or a conviction.”

Because ClearMyRecord can’t help everyone convicted of a crime, Poe started Hard2Hire.org as a non-profit job service for ex-offenders. Since launching in June the site has grown to about 2,000 weekly visitors and, says Poe, several companies have agreed to consider hiring ex-offenders.

Poe explains that many companies with blanket policies against hiring ex-offenders may be willing to modify them in certain cases. “We go straight to employers and ask them about their policy,” he said, describing a give-and-take in which he’ll search for the threshold — say a 5- or 10-year-old property crime and clean record since — where a company might relent.

“We see this all the time,” Poe said, “where an old conviction is holding someone back. We need a Fair Criminal Record Reporting Act like the Fair Credit Reporting Act to keep one mistake from being a life sentence.”