Beyond the gallon jars of mayonnaise and the office furniture, shoppers browsing the aisles at some Sams Club stores will find something that isnt usually sold at retail an employee background check in a box.
Make better hiring decisions, says the package, a little smaller than a box of breakfast cereal. Conduct background checks quickly and easily!
With security-conscious employers stepping up scrutiny of job candidates, background checks have become standard procedure at many companies. But the Check-in-a-Box, which is marketed by ChoicePoint, Inc. and began selling alongside other, more familiar, software for $39.77 late last year, points to new efforts by data vendors to market background screening as a consumer product.
ChoicePoint with nearly $800 million in annual revenues, one of the nations largest vendors of personal, financial and legal data also recently began selling background checks via Yahoos HotJobs.com online employment board, offering job seekers the chance to vet themselves. Entersect, owned by competing data provider LocatePlus Holdings Inc., says it plans to launch a self-check service later this year on CareerBuilder.com.
The companies say such checks give workers the chance to spot and correct problems in their personal records before an employer does. The new check-in-a-box, containing a CD-ROM that allows users to tap ChoicePoints online databases, gives small-business owners access to an essential tool previously available mostly to big companies, say ChoicePoint and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
In a survey of personnel executives released in January, about 80 percent said their firms conduct criminal background checks on job candidates, up from 51 percent in 1996. But smaller businesses are still somewhat behind the curve, with 69 percent saying they do such checks, up from 43 percent. The surveys by the Society for Human Resource Management were similar, but not identical. Privacy advocates object, cautioning that selling background checks over-the-counter could put personal information in the wrong hands.
When you mass market background checks like this to anyone who has $40, I think its dangerous, said Pam Dixon, a researcher formerly with the University of Denvers Privacy Foundation who now heads her own group, the World Privacy Forum.