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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

So they're just making it more clear to potential employees that if you don't lie now, you'll lose the offer?

Seems either pretty useless and will just waste more of a company's time, or will just encourage more people to lie about prior convictions (as it will be literally spelled out that they'll rescind the offer if they have a criminal history).

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I think the point is to encourage companies to go through the initial assessment of a potential employee in the hopes that they will find the candidate to be the best option, and then have to actively choose not to employ the person because of a prior conviction. In addition, they will have to evaluate (and it sounds like document) whether they feel the conviction would impact the candidate's ability to perform that specific job for that specific company.

Today, many employers have a blanket "no convicts" check-box on their application forms. This makes it very hard for convicts to find work.

Yes, many companies will continue to have this practice, and some for very good reason, but this creates the potential for a little more sanity to be applied.

Consider sunk costs. As an employer, you've found a brilliant person to fill a position. You've gone through days of interviews, and this is clearly the best candidate. You put out the offer, and then ask for a criminal background check.

At that point, the candidate says "When I was 19 I got into a fight in a parking lot and was convicted of assault, had three years probation".

Now you've gone to all this trouble and you like the guy, but have to decide whether that history matters or not.

Before, you'd have simply filtered his resume from the pile at the start and never even interviewed him.

As I said, seems like it's going to waste a lot of company money. Maybe small businesses will take the risk, but big company lawyers are going to be telling their people to eat the cost. Now you're even setting the basis of the argument that would be used in court, that the company only hired the felon because it was cheaper than finding a new candidate.

Imagine if a cashier, who had previously been convicted of assault for the fight you mentioned, gets into a fight with a customer for whatever reason. If you want past criminals to be able to be hired, you need to have the civil legal system fixed so that a company couldn't be sued for hiring one. That's most of the reason why a company doesn't hire past criminals.

Man, that is incredibly refreshing.

So you make it clear up front that while they will not be asked about any criminial convictions, they will be asked after and will simply have wasted their time.

Plus you usually don't have just one good candidate, you typically have a couple, different people might even prefer different candidates. If you really only have on qualified candidate, what will you do if they quit?

however there are jobs subject to state regulations that forbid those with criminal history from obtaining said job or even the certification.

this is just feel good do nothing regulation. it benefits no one because the end result will be the same.

For a subset of jobs.

By the time a company makes a conditional offer they've generally invested the equivalent of several thousand dollars into the search, if not more. So they're much less likely to reject someone for a conviction then, as opposed to when filtering resumes.

Yeah, I think both laws are right steps in the right directions. But I don't know if they are big steps.

The hope is by the time a company has invested enough to make a conditional offer that they are more willing to forgive a conviction history.

>>will just encourage more people to lie about prior convictions

What is the point in lying about conviction? All convictions from every location are recorded into central databases run by companies like Lexis Nexus, so unless the employer is not using any kind of quality back ground check service lying is pointless as your criminal history is about 2 clicks away on a keyboard.

Most companies are not spending the thousand of dollars each on a real background check that is very likely to find "all" the things.

> All convictions from every location are recorded into central databases

This simply isn't true. Perhaps the overwhelming majority of cases are? But definitely not all. Plenty of court systems do not provide free electronic access, and you must show up in person to do a search. Companies of course have existed forever to do this work for you, but it's not a simple SQL query.

The standard $35/ea background check is effectively a credit check. Even the next "tier" up that costs $500+ simply does a credit check to pull known addresses, and then sends someone in to those counties to check them individually. If you committed your crime in a county you never lived in, you have a pretty decent chance of it not coming up on a background check.

I would say if you have a conviction in your past that is keeping you from employment by disclosing it, there really is nothing to lose by lying about it. It can really only help you. The vast majority of background checks are simply checking a compliance box using the lowest cost provider, and have a fairly high likelihood of a false negative. I assume they do fairly well at federal felonies and major crimes committed in major metropolitan areas. Beyond that it gets spotty quick.

I guess that is just more reasons to live in a rural area then a Urban one then. Less likely though courts will be creating databases of ruin on their citizens

I've had three background checks and theyve come back missing information I gave directly to the company doing the background check. A lot of companies seem to be no better than 10 minutes with Google and are just for show. The only companies I know of that do actual, accurate background checks go through state services. Doing that as a regular part of your business makes you fall under extra regulations though, so many companies skip it to save money

Same experience. Commercial background checks as used by companies today are useless except as checklist liability-limitation.

If you actually care about finding out what a person might not be disclosing with any reliability, that costs a fair bit more.

You'd be surprised at the number of places that say they check but never do, especially small businesses. Some just don't want to spend the money.

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