Screening potential employees or tenants has become standard procedure before someone is hired or allowed to rent or lease.
It has become a big business as evidenced by the hundreds of companies competing for business on the Internet.
A county criminal check is one of the basic checks on potential employees or tenants.
When someone applies for employment, they will usually have to sign a form that authorizes their potential employer to perform a background check.
This person will provide past and present addresses.
The employer will then hire a background screening company to perform a criminal history check for each area in which the person has lived going back a certain amount of time.
There are national data bases and online databases that contains millions of records.
However, the only way to get a thorough background check done is to do it at the county level.
Some counties have all their criminal case indexes online and are accessible by anyone with a computer.
However, there are many counties where a background check can only be done at the court.
Background screening companies usually have a network of researchers who work in counties across the United States.
These researchers would search for criminal records on a subject in their particular county or counties.
As a firm hiring a background screening company, you would usually pay for the number of counties that you need searched.
For example, if John Smith is applying for a job and he lists two address for the past ten years, one in Tumbleweed County, Texas, and one in Earthquake County in California, the employer would pay for a search in two counties.
The background screening company would send John Smith's name and date of birth to a researcher in Tumbleweed County and to one in Earthquake County.
This would effectively search the two counties that John Smith has lived in during the past ten years.
A count criminal search combined with other online searches can serve as a comprehensive check for criminal records.
With most employers facing the rising costs of business, the do not want the potential liability of hiring someone with a criminal past.