Always ask to see the background check details if you're the hiring manager (you should have the rights to see that despite what HR might tell you). Could be just a personal issue an HR employee might have with a former colleague. Or discrimination-based (happens).

One day one of the feared internal security team who had caught him years ago was in the building and met him and freaked out - our centre mangers politely told him to f off when he demanded that we fire the guy.

Socially Adept Frenchman: 1 Human Resources: 0

If you're referring to private reference checks, of the type that would surface "personal issues people might have with formal colleagues", you're not entitled to anything whatsoever.

If you're a hiring manager in an organization where HR handles background checks, you personally as the hiring manager are entitled to nothing. I would venture further that it's inappropriate for HR to provide criminal/credit background check information to hiring managers.

You mean in any kind of practical or legal sense or in your personal opinion?

I see this happen all the time and am not aware of any thing barring this in the U.S.

Think about the two extremes. If a startup of a few people run a background check there is no HR dept so the CEO/hiring manager is seeing it.

On the other hand if the hiring manager is the CEO at an F500 company trying to hire a handpicked rockstar exec and a background check pops there no way that person will be rejected only on the word of HR without understanding what the issue is and the context around it.

Somewhere in the middle of those extremes companies may have policies to address the situation, but I don't see how any blanket statement can be made here.

* Candidates are entitled to copies of background/credit reports used to make adverse decisions against them, under the FCRA.

* Candidates are only entitled to the specific document, collected under the FCRA, that was used to make the adverse decision.

* Reference checks --- calls to previous employers and coworkers --- are not governed by the FCRA or, as far as I know, any other law. Candidates are absolutely not entitled to any information about reference checks, but a candidate that "flunks" a reference check might be told so when they're refused a job. Or they might not.

* No law entitles hiring managers to any documentation whatsoever.

Only the last point I made was one of opinion, but I think it's a widely held and pretty common sense opinion:

It is terribly inappropriate for HR to share background check documentation with hiring managers. Companies that employ background checks should have simple, static rules, like "no previously undisclosed felonies" or "no violations relevant to the job", that are evaluated by HR.

It's already a grave violation of candidate privacy to do these kinds of checks in the first place (which is why they have to collect special permission from candidates to do them at all!). It's negligent to then pass that information around the org chart to help others in the company read tea leaves from them.

My opinion here is informed by experience working with companies that do background checks, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are fucked up companies where HR passes copies of credit and background reports to other employees.

True, but in general, it is likely that whatever a background check turns up on someone, such that they're unemployable, is probably available to anyone with a web browser and some time on their hands. The people in the org who want to satisfy their curiosity or sense of self importance as to why someone didn't meet the company's standards can probably find a way to do it.

The reason one really shouldn't what to see this info at all if they can help it (and should have a trustworthy HR office handle this stuff) is that pretty much everything done in the hiring process can be used later on in court. The safest possible position for a hiring manager if the question comes up is "HR indicated the candidate did not pass our background check and so we moved on." And only an idiot wants to answer questions later on about with whom they shared damaging information about a candidate.

To be clear I don't think a lot of this stuff is right. It drives me nuts to see someone ace technical interviews and then not be hired for some insignificant drug related issue. How do companies not realize this probably hurts them more than the candidate? A lot of tech companies don't do drug tests at all, I'm guessing because they've figured this part out.

If you are trying to hire a talented employee, and HR says no way, you better demand they justify it. It's your job to advocate for people on your team, even when they haven't come on board yet. Otherwise no one will.

It's far to easy for HR to auto-reject because of hard-wired criteria, they have no incentive to challenge their own rules for a good candidate.

I know a kid who once was a chip-runner at a casino. The way the job worked was he took cash/chips from poker players and went to the cage to get them chips/cash. He got paid minimum wage plus tips, and was on the hook if he got shorted. But the plus was he'd get $1 tip for each transaction, sometimes more.

But this kid optimized the whole job. He hustled like crazy, minimized cage trips by carrying 7 or 8 racks at a time, and even took optimal routes through the poker room. Watching him work was inspiring, the kid was so driven.

He was making a ton of money, far more than the other chip-runners, and someone ended up complaining. So the room decided chip-runners should pool all tips together. He quit in a rage the next day and chip-running service in the room became awful, the remaining chip-runners now saunter at their own pace, carry a single rack at a time and minimize their risk by slowly counting everything three times.

A couple years later the kid got busted for selling weed out of his house. He ended up serving a few years in prison. He's going to now fail any HR background check/screen. I'd still hire him in a fucking second, and expect him to rapidly work his way up from any entry level role.

I've had my own background checks in the past and no one has shared them with me. Speaking to HR, unless there is a negative item on your record they aren't required to.

o_O

Why would you assume you couldn't?

As soon as individual managers want to make those decisions for themselves, it becomes much harder to refute claims of discrimination.

"Your honor, my client, the recently released child rapist with an iffy work record, is suing because BigCorp says they normally don't hire felons, but a few years ago BigCorp made an exception for a felon who sold marijuana, got his college degree in prison, then after he was released worked at non-profits helping the poor while getting an advanced degree in computer technology and writing several highly regarded academic papers on improving user interfaces for the disabled. That's not fair!"

The specific facts matter, and HR should be fired if they have blanket polices that ignore them. HR needs to serve the business, not the other way round.

So, just because a guy has a bad reference it does not mean that he's necessarily bad.

This is so true. Years ago I was brought into a company specifically to improve their software quality process, but without being aware one of the company owners (of which there was two) was against be being employed for that purpose. I uncovered a lot of incompetence and outright corruption with some employees. The 'good' owner went on stress leave, and then pressure was brought to bear on me, resulting in me quitting on the spot one Monday morning; not my proudest moment, but I couldn't take the pressure any more, and my ally was no-where to be seen. Fast forward a decade, and I interviewed with someone who used to work at the same company; it turns out that my leaving had been framed as 'fired for incompetence', and word had been put around part of the local industry that I was hard to work with, unreliable, bad at my job etc. I laugh about it now, but at the time it really bothered me about the possible damage done to my career and reputation.

I don't know what country you're in so I won't speculate on what's legal or not in your area, but here in the U.S. it's illegal for a prior employer to provide false information to a prospective new employer during a background/reference check. If your former boss tried to blacklist you like that, he'd put his company at risk for a civil suit. And, while it's not illegal to truthfully say that a current or former employee is a bad employee, doing so rides the thin line of opening the company up to a libel lawsuit.

Generally speaking, a company might "dish the dirt" on a former employee if there are criminal charges to back up the claims. Even then, legal and HR will likely frown upon it. Usually, when the new company calls the old company for a reference, the old company will say something like "Yes, $employee worked here from $startDate to $endDate" and refuse to divulge any other information in order to avoid any semblance of libel.

Once again, this is my limited experience in SMB and government settings, I have no experience in mid-to-large businesses, Fortune 500 companies, and Silicon Valley startups. We've all heard stories about managers at such companies going around HR and discussing potential hires at the bar or on the golf course.

You'd be surprised. I did something somewhat similar and was convicted of a federal felony. No fast food place or retailer would touch me with that record. But ironically I've found plenty of IT work with smaller companies.

> Do they fire you if you're not testing positive for cocaine?

I always have a hard time with those contexts. HR sometimes has the wrong idea of what is unacceptable and what is appropriate. There really isn't a good reason for them not to tell you. The only thing that would make sense is if they shouldn't know it.

A similar thing happened to a client. Sysadmin logged into GCP and Azure immediately after termination and just deleted everything. He was in the UK, we were in the US. Wasn't worth it to try to get someone to prosecute, and I'm sure we're not listed as references.

Did get people motivated for a multifactor delete bucket for extra backups.

I was checking out the Sunday paper a few days later (this was the 90s), and it turned out that the guy was a fugitive who basically killed his wife and fed her to the fishes.

Pretty freaky stuff.

It was the creepiest, most cynical thing I've ever seen.

Those guys are gonna be RICH.

Denying transport to someone who's got a history of doing anti-social things behind the wheel seems reasonable. But making them required for all vehicles (if I'm understanding your intention correctly) seems likely to have undesirable results.

Seriously, read up on the history of breath-test machines sometime. Everything from difficult chemistry to literal "oops we misplaced a decimal point in the software".

You flunked your own background check.

Asking previous employers about their experience with an employee, however is not illegal. It's usually not illegal for them to say something negative if it's true, though some businesses are conservative about what they will say out of fear of being sued for slander. Accessing public court records or news stories about criminal cases and using that information for employment purposes is usually not illegal. Asking prospective employees if they've been convicted of serious crimes is usually not illegal.

It does seem to be conventional to include one's photograph, age, sex, marital status, children or lack thereof and place of birth on a CV in Germany. It's not clear to me if it's actually problematic to exclude those, but it's my impression that not following conventions tends to not go over especially well in Germany.

If a company walks away from this and doesn't take legal action; they should themselves get sued by their customers.

Destroying company property is a crime; wether it's defacing a website or ... it's not your property; you are just hired to maintain it (in one shape or another)

Regardless of what crime they may (or may not) have made; you are looking for the person and what they do. Not what they did.

This is a common problem; we look at the past a bias of the future. Life only works out that way if the person is too unwilling to change; and that again is something you should look for in the hiring process.

Lastly; hiring ex-hackers isn't a bad thing. Caring about a background check when hiring an ethical hacker or someone who turned their life around; only shames them and pushes them back where they came.

So be careful or you only end up criminalizing being a criminal.

Also, he is not a hacker, just an asshole. Having the admin login and password doesn't make you elite. The only weakness he exploited was himself.

What they did; and more importantly have they recovered and not commited another crime of similar circumstances.

P.S. I knew a kid when I was younger who helped an ISP start up in Colorado Springs in the late 90's... he got fired and he hacked them and spent 6months in jail; eventually they re-hired him after he got out of jail only for a repeat offense.

There is a point; he did it twice. The first time they could pass it off as they didn't know; the second time they hired him they were legally liable.

So this gentleman should spend some time in jail for what he did.

Yeah, that. Also, secure backups and compartmentalized systems and data access.

Automated tools may need to delete and list; but heck off site secure backups are an amazing thing.