Located in southeast Pennsylvania near Philadelphia, Berks County has a large population of about 429,000 people. Nearby counties include Chester, Lancaster, Lebanon, Lehigh, Montgomery, and Schuylkill. Major employers in Berks County include Wal-Mart, Penske, and the Reading Hospital.
Always a vibrant community due to its location along major transportation corridors, Berks County enjoys a service-based economy with a small but vibrant community of food manufacturers. With its proximity to Philadelphia and attractive environment, the area continues to grow and attract newcomers. For businesses, this means opportunities to search frequently for more talented employees. However, the closeness of a major metro area and local economic conditions mean that employers may encounter more potentially unsuitable applicants.
Businesses based in Berks County should approach hiring cautiously with an eye toward ensuring a safe, well-informed decision. Cover letters and interviews are helpful, but they can’t tell the whole story in isolation. Turning to the utility of a criminal background check provides your hiring process with the improved confidence level necessary to move forward.
Once time-consuming, today’s background check solutions can provide rapid, near-instant results for employers’ most common types of vetting. Reports that break down the results and explain what you need to know make evaluating criminal history data a simple process rather than a crash course in the justice system. With the right reporting tools available to your team, you can engineer a hiring process with more built-in guardrails.
How do you build such a process? The key lies in the workflow you follow. Employers should seek the widest possible point of view on a candidate to start, then magnify local results with additional searches when necessary. If a report compiled from sources available nationwide indicates that your applicant has a criminal record, you can seek out more detailed records to investigate further. Reports that indicate pending court cases should be of particular concern.
Using background checks is essential, but you must do so legally. Pennsylvania does not have a “ban the box” law for private employers. Still, the state does forbid consideration of criminal information for anything beyond suitability for the position. Applicants must receive written notification if you disqualify them because of criminal history items. Alongside these rules, employers must also abide by the disclosure rules outlined in the FCRA and should consider reviewing the recommendations published by the EEOC.
It takes minimal time to start your background check process on a new applicant. Order the US OneSEARCH from backgroundchecks.com first for a nationwide point of view. This search includes Berks County court records. Review our coverage map for more about our data sources from all 50 states
Did your background check report indicate that an applicant is currently in the justice system? State-level databases can take time to reflect changes occurring in ongoing court cases. Order a county-level background check to review these court records for the most recent updates possible.
Criminal background reports generated by backgroundchecks.com include information from the following:
These reports can include the subject’s:
Make safe and smart hiring decisions in the Berks County region with robust support from backgroundchecks.com.