Employment Litigation Attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota

What are the legal pitfalls of performing background checks?

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There are quite a few, if you are an employer and you hire an outside agency to do a background check, you are required by statute to inform the individual that you are doing the background check, and you have to get their authorization. If you are doing the background check yourself, if you are an employer and doing the background check yourself, you don’t have to get that pre-authorization or consent, but you can run into some problems.

If you’ve done a background check and you’ve looked at someone’s Facebook page or their Twitter account or that kind of thing, and it reveals their ethnicity, that they are disabled, that they are African-American, some sort of protected class that you may not know otherwise and they don’t get the job. Well, the potential candidate could come back and say, “Well, you found that protected class information out in the world, the Internet world there, and you used that as a basis to not hire me.”

So, it’s best to use your application, and once an employee is given a conditional offer of employment you can do a more thorough background check and have less risk.

Minneapolis employment law attorney Greg Stenmoe considers the legal challenges for employers when performing background checks.

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