FCRA Employment Screening

What is FCRA employment screening?

Part of the intended purpose of the FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) is to provide an employment applicant an opportunity to dispute a hiring decision based on their past civil or criminal records. To fulfill that objective, there are recommended guidelines for employers to follow when doing employment background checks. These guidelines offer potential employees a right to a fair and unbiased consideration for an open job position. Although somewhat similar, FCRA compliance is not to be confused with EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission).

What steps should an employer follow to be FCRA compliant?

FCRA employment background checks constitutes offering the potential employee "transparency" in the background screening process. Ideally an employer should follow steps described below:

1. Procure a signed Background Check Authorization release from applicant.
2. Provide employment candidate a Pre-Adverse Action letter.
3. If you feel applicant is unsuitable for the position and your decision is based on background check results, you must follow up with Decline Letter to applicant stating the reasons for their disqualification and how to dispute the findings.
4. Decline letter must contain a copy of their background check report along with a summary of FCRA consumer's rights.

Tip: You must use the same type of background searches for all applicants applying for a particular position. You cannot do a more comprehensive background check on an applicant and a simple background screening on another applicant applying for the very same job position. Otherwise, you may end up with an EEOC discrimination lawsuit.

Got questions? We got answers.

Q: I'm a small business owner, not a lawyer. How can I do an FCRA compliant employment background check?

A: By following the FCRA steps aforementioned, you can order any of our background searches, provided that you follow any positive criminal records with a county court criminal search and a decline letter offering the applicant an opportunity to dispute the facts.
Tip: We highly recommend including a social security identity verification as a first line of defense in order to verify names, aliases, date of birth and past address history. You want to ascertain that you are searching the true identity of the applicant, otherwise, you may get false negative results. This type of search serves as a starting point and it can be found in many of our background search combination packages. At a minimum, you should also order a county court criminal search with any type of employment background check searches.

Q: How do I prepare an adverse action or decline letter?

A: We take care of that for you. Our system will pre-populate an adverse action or decline letter including a copy of the employment candidate's background check report as well as a copy of the FCRA consumer's rights and automatically mail it from our offices. Please contact us to enable this feature into your business account.

Q: Our company employs over 500 employees, how can I streamline this FCRA employment background screening process?

A: We offer an A thru Z applicant tracking platform that allows you to track every step of the hiring and onboarding process while mantaining FCRA and EEOC compliance. Click on image below for more information.

If your present employment background screening process is too slow, it could possibly force your prospect to apply with your competitors.

Nowadays, it's business at the speed of light. And you are only as good as the company you keep.

That's why you want to recruit the best talent, make sure they are qualified and in addition, stay compliant with employment background screening laws. All to be done by the end of the day.

Need it Now?

Click image below to signup for a business account. Once logged, you can order employment background checks.

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