Credible criminal background checks are a must for any organization in order to give its employees a sense of peace and security. Doing it right will ensure safety, not just for the co-workers but for the organized structure of the organization as a whole. Organizations can avert problematic incidents of criminal scale by carrying out criminal background check without exceptions. Criminal offenses involving an employee could potentially drag the employer to court and tarnish its reputation. This makes criminal background checks an essential part of the hiring process in any organization today. The need of these checks gets further compounded by statistical data pointing towards the steep rise in crime rates.

What is a criminal background check?

A criminal background check is a comprehensive search of criminal records (if any) at all possible levels – County, State, Nationwide and/or International. Such checks are achieved through the concerted efforts of research teams – searching, tracing and tracking of all the required information from the piled list of records.

However, one can refine and speed up the search (as per the requirements) by choosing the right kind of search. There are different types of criminal background searches. A few of them are listed below:

• County Criminal Search.

• Statewide Criminal Record Search.

• Nationwide Criminal Database Search.

• International Criminal Search.

• Registered Sex Offenders Search.

• Patriot Act/Terrorist Watch list Search.

What kind of criminal offenses can be uncovered by using these checks?

Possibilities are many, and all of these can be broadly categorized under the following:

• Traffic Offenses: driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs or both, hit & run cases, other traffic rule violations.

• Misdemeanors: domestic violence, stalking etc. - crimes punishable by incarceration.

• Felonies: murders, burglary, arson etc.

The most important parameters of such searches are accuracy and reliability. However, the accuracy and reliability would greatly depend on the comprehensiveness of the database used and it's networking with other data sources. The scale of networking demands years of work and effort to build up amenable contacts. Also, the time required to return a result for the searched data varies. County searches can be delivered within a couple of days, where as a nationwide search might take a little bit longer. The most obvious reason being that county court is the place where the crime gets recorded initially, whereas the State criminal record is a collection of county criminal records.

Criminal background checks are just another means of interpreting information with accuracy to ensure safety in the work place. As they say, "prevention is better than the cure".