Should employers be allowed to do credit checks?

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Today, credit checks, tomorrow, genetic screening. There will come a day when whole industries will automatically reject someone. Hope you like what they say your good at.

GO GATTACA!! !

Or you could keep a vials of other people's blood handy

I picked "no", since it discriminates against the poor in general, regardless of qualifications. Also, for people like me who (aside from the unfortunate student loans) try not to operate upon borrowed money, it is simply an unsuitable measurement of financial responsibility.

... unless an employer is actually *looking* for hungry people on the chance they will be more inclined to show up regularly. One of my first mentors had a bit of that in his own mindset. He said he would pay me enough to not slight me, but not too much lest I not need to come to work every day.

In a world where past employers will no longer tell you what they really think out of fear of being sued, employers are grasping for anything that will tell them what type of person they are really looking at it. I doubt the score is what interests them; I think they are looking for something else - indications you've lived somewhere you aren't mentioning, who you've done business with, things like that. Anything that would explain a gap they may already be seeing.

But they can't run a credit check without your permission, so someone with valid reasons for poor credit has ample opportunity to explain it BEFORE the check is run. Just say, "I am happy to give you access to that information, but you should know that I was unemployed for a time last year, and I was unable to pay some bills on time as a result." Interviews are not made or broken based on your past errors, but on how you present them.

I once interviewed a guy with horrible grades and a lot of job changes. But something in his cover letter grabbed us, and we figured we'd interview him. We asked him about it, and he was blunt: he told us he had been a goof ball, that he had drunk too much, partied too hard, and made a lot of mistakes. But he also told us that if we talked to anyone he had worked with in the past year, they would tell us, he had changed. He was hungry to prove himself, and confident he had the brains and dedication. We gave him the chance, and he came through for us.

Another guy had great work experience but the minute we got to the touchy situation of why he wanted to leave his current job, we got a long story about how everyone was out to get him, how unfair his career was treating him, and so on. We did not hire him.

More similar to the issue at hand is would be the time I was helping a client interview potential controllers. There as a candidate we both liked, but there was something neither of us could put our finger on that bothered us. My client ran a back ground check, with the candidate's permission, and uncovered a series of drunk driving convictions. That explained what we then realized had been evasive answers. My client's response was, "why didn't she just tell us? I would have understood; but she hid it instead. That makes me feel she stills has a problem." The candidate was not hired.

People get rough spots in their backgrounds. A smart interviewer isn't looking for happy shinny perfect lives; they are looking for people who take responsibility for their mistakes and can show that they know how to learn from them and move forward.

The job market is completely different now. The competetion is so fierce and so much prescreening is done over the internet. Recruiters often do the hiring these days (yet another worthless middleman sucking the benefit of real productivity out of the workplace - but that's another topic). These 3rd party people are hired for the sole purpose of provided the best qualified applicants for the open position with or without actual knowledge of what the job entails. They do credit checks, physicals, etc. before even talking with the applicants.

My husband was recently unemployed (the company closed his store) and I am a stay-at-home mom. We had a house, we paid our bills, and had excellent credit. That's all gone now. He took a job for less pay and we couldn't keep up. Thankfully, he finally received a job offer with pay that was similar to his previous position, but we had to relocate to another state. Our house is in pre-foreclosure (underwater) because no one's buying these days. We pay all of our bills on-time, but we couldn't afford to pay a mortgage and rent. So now our credit stinks, but we're soooo thankful that my husband even has a job. He also has a physical disability so for him, it was tremendously hard to find work.

Our story is a very common one these days. A person becomes unemployed, can't keep up with the bills, credit takes a hit, and now s/he has an even more difficult time finding a job. It's a downward spiral towards poverty. One created by those at the top. Credit checks are a very discriminatory practice and they are certainly not going to help our economy get back into shape - at least not for the middle-class and below.

I do realize I see a different part of the job market, in that I have never worked for or with a "large" company. I work in what I think is the much more interesting segment of the economy - where the entrepreneurship is, where the family businesses are, and so on. Those people do their own hiring, or maybe let their CPA help, and they look for a very definite personality type. They get, in my opinion, the best employees, because they actually will look beyond the obvious. If someone looking for a job needs a potential employer to look beyond the obvious, I strongly recommend working the small business sector. As much as I envy my sister's pension at her big company, there is nothing in me that could deal with the bureaucratic crap she deals with. I like having a devil I can yell at and be heard by, if I'm going to be stuck with a devil

But you do have to search the market differently; these jobs are landed on foot and by phone more often than through open internet search (although Craigs List has gotten popular).

Number5, I'm sorry to hear you've been struggling, but glad to hear you've got a set course. Some close friends of mine gave up a house through foreclosure, and they really struggled with that decision, and will actually be paying taxes because of it, but the alternative was worse, and I recommended that they swallow it and move on. They did get a new house in their new state before the foreclosure went on record, so they should be able to ride it out. It won't be pretty, but life isn't always pretty. They bought the dream, and now they have to let go of it; it's hard.

You have watch GATTICA too many times.

ruveyn

I believe many good points are being made here, and these factors you have mentioned are certainly not insignificant. At the same time, however, one large company where I used to work had its own "sister" employment agency across the street supplying a steady flow of people for its menial-labor workforce while working in cahoots with a bi-lingual, HR staff member who actually "specialized" in helping people get placed there even without having proper residency or work-permit documentation. But overall, yes, "the system" does seem to be getting continually tougher ...

... and the international company that eventually purchased the place I just mentioned has since cleaned up even that place and has fired that certain HR-staff member who had once made a difference even for me (and I am "legal").