Birmingham Metropolitan Area

At the heart of Alabama, the Birmingham metro area, commonly referred to as Greater Birmingham, contains seven counties with an overall population of about 1.1 million. The region’s constituent counties include Bibb, Blount, Chilton, Jefferson, St. Clair, Shelby, and Walker counties.

A highly diverse economic center, Greater Birmingham is home to both heavy industry and a robust service sector with finance, healthcare, and other industries playing a key role across the area. Important employers serving Greater Birmingham include Books-a-Million, Regions Financial, and Alabama Power. Birmingham is known for its ability to attract both visitors and new residents from throughout the state.

The result of this lively economy and mobile workforce is that Birmingham-based businesses can tap into a source of motivated job-seekers ready to fill open positions. However, not every applicant will be the right fit for your business, and some may even pose potential risks. Understanding and evaluating these risks is the role of your background check process, but metro-area operations such as those in Birmingham demand a more thorough approach to vetting. 

Modifying your policies to adapt to the realities of modern metropolitan economies requires considering the mobility of the local workforce. With applicants potentially coming from one of seven different counties, restricting your background checks to only one county–such as Jefferson–could mean losing a chance to examine records held by Shelby or Walker counties. Such a missed opportunity means making a hiring decision without all the facts. 

To begin the process of refreshing and modernizing your procedures, stop to review your business’s compliance efforts with regards to fair hiring. 

While the city of Birmingham bans the box for public-sector positions within city government, there are otherwise no rules in Alabama governing when or how employers may ask applicants about their criminal histories. There are also no rules on delaying background checks. Only records sealed or expunged by the courts are off-limits; employers may otherwise consider all convictions and arrests (though the latter do not appear on most background checks). 

After a thorough review, start retooling your background check process with new tools to empower your efforts. With backgroundchecks.com, tailoring the appropriate solution for your business’s unique needs is simple and easy. 

For the entire Greater Birmingham area, including Bibb, Blount, Chilton, Jefferson, St. Clair, Shelby, and Walker counties, we furnish in-depth searches of criminal records held at each county’s courthouse. A wider-ranging state background check can provide a state-wide snapshot of criminal records, and our regional OneSEARCH is a powerful custom tool capable of producing results for 5 states at once. 

Information in these reports typically comes from state sources such as the Department of Corrections and sex offender registries.

Operating in Greater Birmingham presents both opportunities and challenges for businesses. A careful look at your vetting efforts could reveal that you need to do more to truly complete your due diligence as a metro-area employer. Discover how backgroundchecks.com can assist you in making smart hiring decisions.