Do you know who you are hiring?

• Author: Niam, Edward, Jr.

The doorbell rang, and Elizabeth Harrison went to answer it. Looking through the peephole, she noticed a familiar face. It was neither a friend nor an acquaintance, but a man who had been in her house just days before. Opening the door, she allowed someone in who would change her life forever.

Harrison let into her home a delivery man who worked for Tallahassee Furniture. Just a few days earlier, he and other employees had delivered furniture and picked up a piece that needed repairs.

Using a pretext, the delivery man, who was alone this time, gained entry into her home. He proceeded to attack her viciously with a knife, permanently damaging one arm and inflicting emotional scars that may never heal. Harrison sued Tallahassee Furniture and was awarded $1,900,000 in compensatory damages and $600,000 in punitive damages. During the trial, the evidence showed that the delivery man never had filled out an application or was a pre-employment background investigation conducted. A simple criminal records search, costing as little as $20, would have revealed a long documented history of violent criminal acts.

The jury's verdict in favor of Elizabeth Harrison found Tallahassee Furniture negligent for not checking the delivery man's background. Was she wrong in letting that person into her home? Should she have known the person delivering her furniture was a convicted criminal with a history of psychiatric problems'? There is an implied trust that the person representing the cable company, public utility, pizza shop, or furniture store has a clean background and is not a dangerous felon. People have come to expect -- and demand -- that the service people they come in contact with every day have been thoroughly screened by employers so that they do not have to be concerned with becoming victims of rape, robbery, and attack in their own homes.

This trust often is misplaced because there are individuals who have serious problems in their backgrounds working in every industry in this country. The workplace is teeming with acts of violence, drugs, and theft.

In the human resource service industry, there is an age-old question: How do I hire the best people for my company? The solutions are not simple, but there is a starting point. Pre-employment background cheeks can provide the necessary information to take the guesswork out of hiring the best candidates.

A pre-employment background check encompasses verification of the information contained in a resume and employment application, as well as researching data from other sources. As a note of interest, in Ohio, falsification of a job application is a violation of the Ohio Revised Code 2921.13 and a criminal offense. An employer should specify the areas of greatest concern for each level of employment.

Most information included in a pre-employment background check comes from public record sources, with the exception of a credit report, for which a signed release is essential. Employers will the on firm legal ground as long as inquiries comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, Americans with Disability Act, Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

There are many reasons to conduct pre-employment background checks on job applicants. The first and foremost is to hire better workers. This will ensure a number of benefits such as a total lower cost of hiring: reduction in turnover; protection of assets and the firm's name; shielding employees, customers, and the general public from theft, violence, drugs, and harassment; and insulation from negligent hiring and retention lawsuits.

Credit history. According to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (Public Law 91-508), there are several permissible purposes for which a consumer's credit report may be obtained. For this article's purposes, we are concerned about pre-employment, retention, promotion, and re-assignment. Every employer has the right to review the credit history of any job applicant. This phase of a background check requires a signed release.

Years ago, the concerns were that one only had to look at a person's financial history if he or she were going to handle money. This no longer is true. The...