Resources
Resources
Reference material for the people who run screening programs. Written to be specific enough to act on, which mostly means saying where a rule comes from and what it does not cover.
The compliance section next door covers what the law is, state by state. This section covers what to do about it.
Compliance
Adverse action notices
Every vendor page says the same eight things about adverse action and stops. This one starts where they do and keeps going: the provenance of the five day rule and what it is not worth, how to count days and prove receipt, which of the two statutes drives which notice, and what to do while a dispute is still open.
Read the article24 min
Compliance
FCRA compliance for employers
The employer side of the statute, section by section: permissible purpose, standalone disclosure, the seven year limits and why convictions are not among them, the salary threshold that almost nobody applies, and the duties that cannot be delegated to the screening company.
Read the article19 min
Court records
How criminal court records work
A screening result is a statement about a search, not about a person. This explains how criminal courts are organized, why the courthouse and the jurisdiction are different things, and the specific ways a name based search misses a record that is sitting there.
Read the article15 min
Compliance
Ban the box and fair chance hiring
Fair chance law is a second, separate layer sitting on top of the FCRA, with its own notices and its own timing. This covers what the laws require, the states and cities that go further, and the error of treating a fair chance notice as a substitute for an adverse action notice.
Read the article16 min
Compliance
What is a consumer reporting agency
The term is used loosely and defined precisely. Who is a consumer reporting agency, who is not, and why the answer decides which party owes which notice. Written by one, about the role, including the parts of the role employers usually get wrong.
Read the article13 min
Program design
The screening program toolkit
The five documents a screening program needs, published in full rather than summarized, each with the reasoning behind its choices and the statutes that drive it. Read them here or download them and adapt them.
Read or download34 min
Program design
Rescreening and post hire screening
Running a check on someone who already works for you is not the pre-employment process with a different date on it. Consent has to cover the future, an alert is not yet a report, and there is no severity exception that lets you skip the sequence.
Read the article11 min
Program design
Contractor and staffing screening
Contingent workers are covered by the FCRA employment definition more often than the contracts assume, and the employee investigation exclusion is narrower than it reads. This covers who sends which notice when there are three parties, and where the agency relationship changes the answer.
Read the article11 min
Compliance
Screening in regulated industries
Most screening content lists industries and repeats what the vendor pages say. Sorting the requirements by mechanism instead gives a different answer, because a statutory bar and an access control impose entirely different duties, and half of what is sold as a background check requirement is not one. Every citation is to the primary source.
Read the article33 min
Why these read the way they do
Most published guidance on this subject is accurate and stops one question short of useful. It will tell you that a pre-adverse action notice is required, for instance, without saying where the five day waiting period everyone quotes actually comes from, which is a set of FTC staff opinion letters from 1997 and 1998 rather than a regulation, and which therefore binds nobody.
So each of these pieces states the rule, names the instrument it comes from, and then says what it does not settle. Where a widely repeated figure turns out to have no authority behind it, that is written down rather than repeated. Where two sources disagree, both are given.
One consequence worth stating plainly: a shorter answer that is right beats a longer one that hedges. Several of these articles are the length they are because the question is genuinely long, and not because length was the aim.
This is reference material, not legal advice. It describes what the statutes and their sources say as at the review date on each page. It is not a substitute for advice from counsel on your own process. See the terms of use.