Jacksonville Metropolitan Area

Anchored by a major Atlantic port city and home to one of Florida’s most diversified economies, the Jacksonville metropolitan area dominates the northeast corner of the state. Sometimes called Metro Jacksonville, the area contains 1.5 million residents across five counties: Baker, Clay, Duval, Nassau, and Saint Johns. 

A hub for finance and logistics, Metro Jacksonville has a robust economy that features a growing media sector and a strong U.S. military presence. Key employers in the area include Bank of America, Citi, health insurer Florida Blue, and UPS.

Living in a sprawling urban region surrounded by smaller communities that are linked by a highly intricate roadway system, for Metro Jacksonville employees, commuting into the city for work is a routine aspect of life. Growth in the area continues to drive metro-area residents to cast a wide net for job opportunities, often looking well outside their home counties. 

For area businesses, metro jobseekers bring both benefits and challenges. Your business benefits by having a greater diversity of choice and a higher likelihood of attracting suitable talent, but you must field a higher number of unsuitable applications in the process. Though you may already rely on background checks to separate out the chaff, metro-area operations demand a more thorough policy for safety and confidence. Consider the last time you updated your hiring procedures. Have they evolved to stay in line with metro area challenges and national and state requirements? If a business based in Duval receives an applicant from a resident of St. Johns County but only checks records held by the courts in Duval, the vetting process could lead to the business mistakenly missing important records—and potentially hiring an entirely unsuitable candidate.

With that in mind, take this time to review your procedures so you can consider how to strengthen them into a truly metro-wide background check policy. As you do so, a few steps will guarantee continued compliance with fair hiring regulations that apply to your business.

In Florida, there are no “ban the box” rules that govern when or how employers may ask about criminal records. Likewise, Florida allows inquiries into arrest records, though background checks typically do not report non-conviction-related arrests. With no other state-specific laws governing the use of background checks, employers must still stay within the bounds of federal rules such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

For businesses ready to modernize their hiring procedures for functional metropolitan operation, backgroundchecks.com provides easy access to versatile tools. Criminal record results are instantly available for the entire Jacksonville metro, including Baker, Clay, Duval, Nassau, and Saint Johns counties, through our US OneSEARCH. To consider results from the entire state and its other metros, such as Miami and Orlando, use a state-level check. To broaden your search even further, regional OneSEARCH reports allow for the inclusion of up to 5 states at once.

These criminal record reports collect data from the following sources: the Florida Department of Corrections, the state sex offender registry, and county-level courts. All sources update their data monthly. Criminal history reports may include a subject’s:

• Name
• Arrest date and charges
• Sentence
• Disposition date

For businesses based around Jacksonville, implementing a metro-wide background check is a matter of smart and safe policy. Find out how these tools can strengthen your hiring processes.