Essential Tips to get a Criminal Record Search

There are several federal and state laws stating that applicants need not disclose their criminal past, yet there are some exemptions that allow a criminal record search. For instance, when you are planning to hire a nanny, a care giver, or a housekeeper, you need to conduct a criminal record search. Schools, health organizations, and businesses with sensitive services, such as security maintenance, also need to conduct criminal record search. The following are suggestions on how to go about in conducting a criminal record search.

Pre-employment Criminal Record Search

If you are an employer, do cover all the necessary bases before committing yourself to a full-blown criminal record search. Consider your justifications and the subsequent costs of conducting a criminal record search on an applicant. Consider also the impact of a criminal record search on the applicant itself and its potential effect on work performance.

If you are the employer, do not initiate criminal record search without the written consent of the person concerned. It helps if you collect pertinent information like full names, dates of birth, and social security numbers, to make sure there are mistaken identities in the criminal record search done.

 Information continued below Easy Search Form

Criminal Record Search Service Providers

There are a lot of criminal record search providers and most are accessible online. Do take time to peruse and select legitimate ones to make sure that you get the right results for the criminal record search. A good criminal record search provider may has extensive networks of on-site researchers who will collect data from county or state repositories.

Criminal Record Search of County Records

A good place to start criminal record search would be the information contained in county courts where the person concerned is currently living. There’s also a good chance that details contained in criminal record search done at county level is both comprehensive and up-to-date. However, when the person you are doing a criminal record search on has moved from place to place, you need to check the counties indicated by past addresses.

Department of Corrections Criminal Record Search

A criminal record search can also include records from state prison systems. However, criminal record search results must still be cross-referenced with other available records, as imprisonment in county jails are not included in state’s Department of Corrections records. 

Statewide Criminal Record Search

Some states also maintain databases on criminal cases and might provide pertinent details for criminal record search. One known drawback in this process, however, is that not all systems are updated in a timely fashion. A criminal record search might not turn up any records for crimes committed recently. Again, it is prudent to do cross-referencing with county records.

Criminal Record Search of Driving Records

Make sure that the report on criminal record search also includes driving history the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. A criminal record search on this department can turn up serious traffic violations and convictions. This criminal record search report is particularly important when the person concerned will also be assigned to drive company vehicles.

Criminal Record Search through U.S. District Courts

Another place to conduct a criminal record search is through the U.S. District Courts. They have an online service providing information cases it handled, though the one conducting the criminal record search sometimes need to do more research. This is because information contained in their system may not contain any background on the defendant.

Cross-referencing Criminal Record Search Results

Cross-referencing all of the data from many public record sources is a typical problem encountered by people trying to do a Background Search on their own.  This is where an online Background Search company can be of great service because they specialize in collecting all available public data, organizing it into a database, and making it instantly available to you on the internet.

Easy Search Steps:

1. Enter name in search form
2. Search hits are displayed for free
3. Select person(s) & info you need

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