FWIW I've been checked by several employers throughout my career – and generally none of them warned me beforehand, I just got the letter from DBS letting me know they had

1) Good recruiters will bypass some of the HR confusion (misunderstanding team requirements, etc)

2) You have a valuable set of skills and are looking for a specific type of job. Recruiters are better about this than blind applying

Furthermore, the "What industry?" question will be an excellent opportunity to avoid processes where your conviction is likely to impact. People have legitimate reasons for wanting to avoid heavily-regulated industries (boring, slow), so it's not an odd question.

I would say if you go through recruiters, be aware (in the US at least) there are good recruiters (who have a line on positions and work hard) and bad recruiters (who are trying to bootstrap a rep by "representing" as many people exclusively as they can). Be extremely suspicious before signing any exclusivity contracts with one.

As a contractor in the UK, I've had to deal with them many times. The recruiting industry here has a reputation for cut throat, scumbag practices. Lying about open job applications, cold calling to fish for info on your current role, ghosting you after you make an application with them, chronic time wasting/giving false hope. These are some of what you can expect. There are, of course, good recruiters - more 'human' ones. They're rare, but you'll know when you've got one. I have some saved in my phone.

If you are firm with them you can avoid them wasting your time. But to rely on them is a mistake.

Good luck OP. Also +1 for contracting in private sector because the B2B nature of it avoids checks.

Edit: seems like other people have had contracts with clauses around prev convictions, so maybe ask for a blank contract ahead of time.

> The Supplier warrants:

> that the Consultant has no criminal convictions which would reasonably affect the Company's and/or the Client's decision to allow the Consultant access to the Location(s), the Client's Systems or to provide the Services;

Depends on locale. In the UK (IANAL) it wouldn't be _fraud_, but would be grounds to terminating the contract. But not criminal.

Employer could potentially sue for damages, but there must be some damages for that.

After Brexit he'd need a work permit for that, and I assume convictions are a factor with those.

And that may not be fraud of you have a lawyer analyse it.

one extra tip would to try and get some experience that you can put on your CV. eg do some opensource programming - looks good

I would expect that they need to be honest about the conviction when asked. There are a lot of ways to present that as a positive. For example, saying that they will be very committed to a position because it is so difficult to get a job.

That link also mentions the requirements around an ex-offender policy that the company needs to have. I'd request that if I was declined, to ensure the employer is actually following a process. If not, there could be some room for negotiation.

Smaller organizations that are not in regulated industries will be better bets for the original poster. Finance, pharma, healthcare, education etc. are all regulated industries and will have to maintain some level of compliance. How well they do it will vary, but if you aren't flagged initially, you may well be flagged later on. This happens all the time. Small FinTech specialises in trying to skirt the boundary of compliance at times, so you may find that some are laxer than others.

A sweet spot might be software efforts supporting manufacturing or marketing. There are a lot of agencies that build smaller software for large organisations that don't do these in-depth checks and are often building/demoing in their own environment before handing everything over to the company or providing the hosting so that a department can run shadow IT.