Significance

• Criminal background checks are becoming increasingly significant for a number of reasons. The sheer availability of more personal information about people on the Internet has made conducting a background check easier than ever. High-profile cases of child molestation and abduction have made background checks of anyone who works with children mandatory in most cases. The attacks of 9/11 have served to create an atmosphere of paranoia regarding the potential for terrorist activity. Criminal background checks act the preemptive option to avoid these and other pitfalls related to hiring an unknown entity.
  
  

Features

• The range of information that can be included in a criminal background check is wide and varied. The particular features involved in a background check can include everything from a search to determine if the subject is currently on a list of convicted sex offenders to drug test records. Court records that were not legally sealed and protected against being viewed the general public are obviously going to be checked. What many people may not know is that a sophisticated criminal background check can involve education records, military records and can even extend to having one's neighbor's interviewed. It is important to realize that some of these records, as well as other types, are only available under specific legal restrictions.
  
  

Time Frame

• The length of time that it takes to receive the results from a criminal background check will vary depending upon the sophistication of the search. One kind of check is known as an instant background check. An instant check may get some surface information being looked for back in a timely manner, but is likely to gloss over what could potentially be some vital information. It takes time to check the kind of information and records that a background check is supposed to locate. A thorough background check will usually take around a week.
  
  

Warning

• While there are many aspects of privacy that are open game in a criminal background check, there are also some aspects that are off-limits. Most of these elements of a person's background that are exempt from being checked are based on a time frame rather than the kind of activity itself. For instance, while bankruptcies are fair game, this is true only if the bankruptcy has occurred within the past ten years. Arrest records may be important in a criminal background check, but in most states only arrests records of the past seven years are available.
  
  

Benefits

• The biggest benefit for conducting a criminal background check is that doing so may avoid potentially embarrassing situations or hiring an employee who may commit criminal activities while at work. A background check can prevent the humiliation of hiring someone whose history includes illegal activities that may directly contradict the image that an entity is trying to project. For instance, a beer company would not want to find out they hired someone who had been arrested several times for drunk driving. A background check could potentially quite easily avoid similar situations.
  
  

Misconceptions

• The biggest misconception about criminal background checks is probably the mistaken belief that an enormous central database of information exists into which every scrap of paperwork devoted to local, state and federal criminal activity has been fed. The truth is that there is no single repository of all criminal information about an individual. Making a genuinely reliable background check even more difficult is the fact that each state has different regulations for how criminal information is collected, indexed and made available for searching.