About once a month, I get a call from a company saying they are required to run certain background checks for a contract they recently won. In these cases, I ask the person to send me the contract so I can look at the exact wording. And inevitably, the contract is extremely vague and/or wordy. For whatever reason, contracts can leave background checks open for interpretation, which keeps the caller guessing what they need to run. I’m not even sure if the person who writes the contract really knows what they are asking for.
After reading the contract, I can usually decipher what they are asking for. However, sometimes it requires further investigation. In the majority of cases, the person needs to run at least a national and federal criminal check. These are easy to do and we can turn those around the same day most of the time. The crazy thing is when someone calls out of frustration because the company they currently use takes several days to several weeks. They are shocked when I tell them how quickly we can complete the report.
It’s extremely important that if you have a contract to run background checks that you don’t just assume what you think you should run. Different companies call the exact same type of background checks different things. Some companies will dazzle you with crazy wording such as “The ultimate background check”; “The most thorough background check in America”, etc. There’s nothing special about background check reports. We all run the same types of background checks.
