Using Criminal Background Checks to Your Advantage
If you are looking for an online background check website, you are in luck. The internet has opened the floodgates of information retrieval and many private firms can now provide you with a criminal background check report for what ever purpose you may have in mind.

Employers have the most obvious use for a background check service. Business owners cannot afford to take the risk of hiring a criminal, drug addict, kleptomaniac, or worse. A criminal background check provides a way for employers to know who they are hiring beforehand. This saves money in hiring and training costs, which would be wasted in any event due to the need to fire the problematic employee. These services also protect the employer from negligent hiring lawsuits, should a "bad hire" cause damages or injuries to other employees. Having a record of the criminal background check on file makes it clear that the employer did all they could to prevent this.



Home improvement contracting businesses also require an online background check for all employees, as they will be allowed access into customers' homes. Safety and security is of the utmost concern in this field. A criminal background check will effectively root out anyone with a criminal history or sex offender status who cannot safely be allowed access to someone's home. Customers who hire freelancers (who are not affiliated with any company) may wish to use an online background check for the same purpose.

Many other career fields require a criminal background check. Private security and cash handling businesses almost universally require them, as do child care or elder care jobs. Employees of this industry are trusted to take care of vulnerable individuals who may be targets for sex offenders or criminals, so the utmost in security is essential.

Finally, there is one person that few people would ever consider running a criminal background check on: themselves. It sounds like a strange thing to do; wouldn't most people be aware if they had a felony conviction or sex offender status? One would certainly thing so, but errors in public record systems result in convictions incorrectly being placed on the records of dozens of innocent people every year. This error is often not discovered until it costs a person his job, or even results in trouble with law enforcement.

A man from Akron, Ohio was recently denied a driver's license due to an outstanding arrest warrant in West Virginia. Having never even been to West Virginia and certainly not being on the run from the law, the man knew that a mistake had been made somewhere. As it happens, the arrest warrant from several states over had been issued for a man with the same name. Somewhere in the public records, the two individuals had been mixed up in the system, resulting in this innocent man being saddled with an outstanding arrest warrant on his record. Had he run a criminal background check on himself, he could have discovered and addressed this problem long before.

So there you have it: many of the most common uses for a background check service.