Sex offenders are not the most welcome employees with most employers.   While some employers we talk to believe that sex offenders should be given a second chance and that consideration for a position should be based on their talents and not their sex offenders, others believe quite the opposite.

Certain  employers believe sex offenders are toxic to the workplace environment.    I tend to agree.   Office morale is often diminished and there is often undue focus placed on the sex…

Industrial espionage has been on the rise, along with employee theft.   Perhaps it is the bad economy or perhaps the overall loosening of ethics, but more employees, disgruntled and otherwise are stealing valuable proprietary data and attempting to sell it to the competitor.

French automotive giant, Renault, thought it had such a calamity where three of its employees where suspected of stealing sensitive documents related to Renault's electric car program and selling it off to the…

In an economic downturn, there are some employers and many state and local governmental concerns that look to cut costs by avoiding background checks on public officials and political candidates.  Invariably, it seems, such avoidance of background checks comes back to haunt them.   Ugly stuff about an employee's political history is later discovered and this proves embarrassing and in certain cases costly.   There are often civil litigation and liability issues to be considered.

All…

CBS News did a study and found that ninety percent of the nursing homes in the nation hired employees with criminal convictions.   According to CBS News, when the government ran background checks on employees in some 260 nursing homes, 92 percent of them had criminal records.  Pretty remarkable.

This is not some curious group of do-gooders reporting that much of the healthcare industry is populated by convicted…

Make no mistake, industrial espionage is on the rise.  That and an increase in employee theft have given more than one executive premature gray hairs.   Large multi-national corporations and smaller business entities are all vulnerable.  All you need is something the other guy wants.   It can be everything from advanced, first in your space technology to intellectual property.  It can be sensitive databases, customer rosters, proprietary data.

Call it a sign of the times or the…

I guess the good news about drug use is that cocaine usage has declined in the past couple of years.   In fact, cocaine usage has declined some twenty nine percent.  Only about one third of one percent of the population uses cocaine, or so the story goes.

Now for the other news...heroin use has increased.  The federal government applied tighter stands to drug test as part of the employment screening.  There were testing people in such occupations as pilots, airplane mechanics, and…

While in some sectors there is a call to ease up on background checks, the obvious question that comes to mind is who bears the brunt of it if an employee who snaps out and commits to violence in the workplace turns  out to have a history as a convicted felon? Why the employer, of course.  The employer will incur the damages, the litigation and liability issues the public embarrassment and the knowledge that employees were harmed in the working environment.

When violence is committed…

On one of the human resources and recruiting sites there is an ongoing discussion about Social Media as a Background Check and how it may apply to the hiring process.    There are also concerns for Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) compliance and other issues that are being addressed.

As the social media background check is one search as one writer puts it "where the genie is out of the bag." True.  If anything, more employers will be using the social media employment screening search…

The federal government is continuing its crackdown on undocumented workers.  Makes sense with the economy still pretty lousy and with eligible workers in desperate need of jobs.  With unemployment at the mid-nines to ten percent, it would stand to reason that the federal government would like to see eligible workers off the unemployment rolls and back in the workforce.

According to the article in the …

Once upon a pretty short time ago, companies who were thinking of outsourcing or building new manufacturing plants considered Mexico a good idea.  And why not?   Labor is inexpensive, the weather is decent, and Mexican workers are diligent and competent.   There are advantages to locating factories in Mexico, thanks in part to the NAFTA agreement.   Mexico gives businesses easy proximity to the United States, so there is a reduction in shipping costs.

But now Mexico is consumed by a…

I recently read an interesting article Dr. John Sullivan posted on ERE.Net. The article, entitled "What's Wrong With Reference Checks, Part One," says in essence that reference checks tend to suck. His take on employment reference checks may be a little harsh but not entirely inaccurate. But then, like…