Thu, August 31st, 2006 - 11:33 am - By Gordon Basichis
We found this article on Topix.netOnline Recruiting Rebounds in August
Online job recruiting bounced back in August following a seasonal decline last month.
Monster Worldwide says its employment index climbed eight points, with seven out of nine regions showing stronger levels of recruitment.
There was increased demand for workers in retail trade and in the education, training and library occupations, all of which declined in July.
At the same time, the hiring environment for white-collar professionals remained solid with continued heavy recruiting in business and financial operations and IT-related occupations.
While the Monster Employment Index is 22 percent higher than it was a year ago, the year-over-year increase is the lowest since its inception.
Monster’s Steve Pogorzelski, says that suggests a more moderate rate of economic growth, due partly to rising energy prices and a cooling housing market.
With summer ending and retailers and other businesses getting ready for the changing season, it appears more jobs are available. At least on line there are more jobs being offere in August than there were in July. In fact, while some sectors are down, housing for one, there are others that are enjoying a hiring frenzy. Regionally speaking, it is a mini hiring frenzy in the Gulf States.
Human resource departments almost always endure an increase of stress whenever there is an increase in the job market. Time pressures are greater as the HR people are pressured by department managers to hire people and get them online. There is always the temptation to move more quickly than common sense will allow.
Corra stresses that acquiescing to pressure may cause your HR group to move precipitously and allow the wrong kind of candidate to pass into the workplace. Be careful. When you order a pre-employment background check on your new candidate wait for all the essential information to be returned, before you let him into the workplace. Even in cases where employers will accept candidates with misdemeanors or lesser felonies, you want to be sure there are no red flags, like patterns of drug abuse or, worse, violence.
And if you are among the increasingly fewer companies that are still not ordering background checks, we would suggest it is time to get on the ball. As the new season comes about and you conetmplate your number of hires, realize that pre-employment screenings are you best defense against liability, rehires and myriad complications in your business. Most of these are not only dangerous but quite expensive.
So, remember, check them out before you hire.
Wed, August 30th, 2006 - 3:31 pm - By Gordon Basichis
We found this article on Money Web.
Hoping to overtake its rivals, Yahoo stocks up on academics Economists and search gurus fill new research team; data-rich fantasy land.
Michael Schwarz earned an economics doctorate from Stanford University before spending five years as an assistant professor of microeconomics at Harvard University. His research papers include, “Synchronization Under Uncertainty.”
These days, Mr. Schwarz is thinking about how to use economics to save attractive women from unwanted solicitations on an Internet dating site. One idea employs the concept of “scarcity,” rationing the number of free messages each lothario can send. Another uses full disclosure, by displaying how many people a suitor has already approached.
The Russian-born theorist, 36 years old, is at the leading edge of a push by Internet giant Yahoo Inc. to beef up its business by hiring prominent academic
economists and other researchers. The company, which offers consumer services ranging from email to fantasy sports, is betting that sponsoring fundamental research will help it tackle some of its biggest challenges, including battling the technological prowess of Google Inc.
Yahoo was blindsided by Google’s sophisticated Web search. One of Yahoo’s advertising-sales techniques also underperforms its rival’s, and when Yahoo said last month that a revamp would be delayed, the company’s stock fell 22%, its largest-ever one-day drop. Despite having one of the world’s biggest user bases, Yahoo hasn’t fully benefited from hot phenomena such as online video and social networking, a service offered by sites such as MySpace.com.
The research push, “has huge consequences for the business if we do things right,” says Usama Fayyad, Yahoo’s chief data officer.
Central to Yahoo’s goal is its ability to record what millions of consumers do every day, and to study how changes to the company’s Web services affect their behavior. Internet companies in the past have largely lacked the systems and focus to mine data for research, but now they’re viewing it as a key competitive pursuit. For economists, Web operations are data-rich fantasy lands where they can observe in real-time the behavior of millions of consumers in varied marketplaces far more effectively than ever before.
One potential obstacle to collecting and analyzing a vast amount of data is customer privacy, particularly in the wake of concerns stirred up by Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit earlier this summer. It inadvertently released a slew of information relating to users’ search queries.
In addition, tech companies have a mixed record of translating research into profit. Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center is widely credited with inventing several key features of modern computing in the 1970s. But it was Apple Computer Inc. and others that capitalized. Google, with such cautionary tales in mind, sprinkles researchers through its product groups, supplementing a small, standalone research unit. Some Yahoo staffers question whether the company’s engineers have the time or inclination to implement ideas from the research team.
A Yahoo spokeswoman won’t say how many economists or researchers the company plans to hire. A person familiar with the matter says Yahoo aims to build
a team of more than a dozen economists. In the past year, the company has snagged leading talents in microeconomics, Web search and artificial intelligence from universities such as Cornell and Carnegie Mellon, and industrial labs including those of Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. It has opened lab facilities in Berkeley, Calif., New York, Barcelona, and Santiago, Chile, and has begun scouting locations for a lab in Asia.
Until now, university economists typically have had to rely on limited sets of historical data to test their theories. At Yahoo, they can tweak market conditions and watch what happens to the company’s roughly 500 million monthly visitors. The result is faster, and probably more useful than traditional methods such as surveys. Researchers inside and outside these companies also believe collating Web activity can be used to predict future events, such as box-office openings and home sales.
“It’s an amazing opportunity to validate theories that have been floating around for a couple of decades,” says Cornell University Computer Science Professor Jon Kleinberg, who cites as an example ideas about how innovations spread throughout society. Prof. Kleinberg has collaborated with Yahoo’s researchers.
The big push into research dates to March 2005, when Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel confided a concern to top lieutenants that the company risked missing long-term developments. Who in the company is considering what might happen in three to five years, he asked, according to one executive at the meeting.
Mr. Fayyad, 43, the company’s head of data, is leading the effort to answer that question. In April 2005, he sold Mr. Semel on an ambitious plan to fund fundamental research. Mr. Fayyad recruited Prabhakar Raghavan, a former IBM Research veteran who was also wooed by Google and Microsoft, to head the push. Mr. Fayyad told Mr. Raghavan he would be disappointed if Yahoo’s effort didn’t produce a Nobel Prize.
Messrs. Fayyad and Raghavan agreed Yahoo Research would tackle just a handful of areas, including search, the interaction of users online and an artificial-intelligence field known as machine learning, which involves analyzing past data to learn about the future. “The intent isn’t to gaze at the skies,” says Mr. Raghavan, 45.
Instead, researchers are looking at the information Yahoo collects about its users’ activities. That starts with nearly every click and includes what services consumers use in what sequence and which color of buttons they click on most. The company records over 12 terabytes of data daily — the equivalent of about half the information contained in all of the books in the Library of Congress, according to some estimates.
Yahoo and other Internet companies already use some of what they know about consumers’ online habits to target Internet advertising: A user who searches for “Ford Explorer” might see an ad for a sports-utility vehicle when he looks at a news Web site.
Mr. Fayyad co-founded a startup in 2000 that became Revenue Science Inc., a firm that specializes in such behavioral-targeting technology. The technology observes what a consumer does on a site in order to decide which ads to display.
One trick is to generate good matches — looking at an article about an ax murderer doesn’t suggest the reader is interested in buying axes. Another challenge is not to creep out users with blatant matches that serve as a reminder they’re being tracked, such as switching all the ads to those for credit cards if a user clicks on a card offer.
As the recent AOL firestorm highlighted, there are big privacy issues in this line of work. AOL apologized when its data, which were originally intended for use by outside researchers, were made available on a public Web site. While individuals searchers weren’t identified, the words they searched for — such as their names — allowed some to be tracked down without much effort.
Yahoo says it has multiple protections to guard against an AOL-type mistake. The company says it strips out any personal identifying attributes before handing the information over to researchers. In any case, it says, Yahoo’s researchers are interested in the behavior of mass groups, not that of specific individuals.
Guarding against violations is a group that’s known internally as the “Paranoids.” T-shirts worn by Paranoids at one point read: “We worry so our users won’t have to.”
Yahoo submits all outside requests to look at the data to a review committee. It says it has never provided search-related data to outside researchers. Information it has shared include data related to music preferences, based on millions of anonymous ratings.
Technology companies have rarely before placed such a focus on fundamental economic research. Microsoft Research, which employs 700 researchers, says it has no economists on staff. Lucent Technologies Inc.’s Bell Labs has a team of about 30 economists, but their work mostly involves using theory to solve nuts-and-bolts industry problems.
“Right now we’re at the golden age where there’s a lot of work that’s going on that is really lending insight into real-world problems,” says Hal Varian, a University of California, Berkeley, economics professor, who is a consultant to Google.
In 2001, Yahoo started charging for its online dating service — which surprisingly resulted in an increase in membership. Mr. Raghavan thinks the switch increased the value of Yahoo Personals in the eyes of consumers and encouraged them to use it more. While the move predated Yahoo’s recent research push, it’s an outcome economists might have predicted: The fee deterred users who weren’t serious about dating, making the service more efficient for those who were.
Mr. Fayyad says Yahoo Research has already more than covered its expense with a project to better target Yahoo’s advertising for its own services, such as Yahoo Mail and Personals, on the Yahoo site. The team tweaked the algorithms that decide when to show such ads, which beefed up the response rate.
Yahoo believes research might help it with other Internet services whose design, and success, are currently determined by intangible factors. With the help of the research team, Yahoo designed an incentive system for Yahoo Answers, a service where consumers post questions, to which other users respond. Under that system, users receive points for answering questions, and get more points for answering questions that are well received. The top-ranked answerers are featured on a leaderboard and the ensuing competition has improved the service’s quality.
Yahoo is continually tweaking the rules for points, such as by raising the penalty for people asking profane or abusive questions.
One of the team’s biggest challenges is finding ways to improve Yahoo’s ad-auction system, in which advertisers bid to have their ads shown to users who search for relevant keywords, such as “Orlando hotel.” The advertisers pay each time consumers click on the ads.
Yahoo’s ad system gives the most prominent placement to the advertiser that bids the most per click. By contrast, Google weighs additional factors, such as the frequency with which consumers click on each ad, to determine the order the ads are displayed.
Google’s approach generates more revenue per search, since the most popular ads for any query appear more prominently, increasing the likelihood consumers will click on them. Compared with Yahoo, Google brings in roughly 45% more revenue on average for each search query it handles, according to Majestic Research Corp., a research firm based in New York. Yahoo executives concede the structure of its search-ad system has cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Yahoo has consulted with economics professors and its own research staff for a project called “Panama,” the company’s ongoing attempt to revamp its search-ad system. Mr. Raghavan vows that economists will be involved alongside Yahoo computer programmers in building future services, so as to head off future mistakes.
The use of incentives is one of the research areas that interests Mr. Schwarz, the economist who begins at Yahoo next month. He’s currently writing a research paper about economic markets where one side of a potential transaction is eager to profess its preference for the other side, as is often the case with hiring and online dating. The unequal relationship makes such markets complicated and unpredictable. The research has clear applications for Yahoo Personals.
Mr. Schwarz also co-wrote a paper examining search-ad auctions. It concluded that Yahoo’s system doesn’t encourage people to bid what they think the ad is worth to their business, something that caught the attention of Yahoo executives. They expect Mr. Schwarz to work on future versions of their ad systems, a task he has already embraced.
“This is the type of problem economists have been studying for the past 60 years,” Mr. Schwarz says.
Undoubtedly, Michael Schwarz and his expertise will be of prominent value to Yahoo as they quest after the future of the Internet. However, we were struck with the fact that one of Schwarz’s assignments is to “use economics to save attractive woman from unwanted solicitations on an Internet Dating Site.”
Corra suggests that to eliminate at least the first line of creeps from one’s online dating site, the site should be conducting comprehensive background checks on every member. While this is no guarantee that attractive women will no longer draw the solicitations of annoying suitors and potential predators, it will help eliminate a fair share of the jerks no one wants to deal with.
We wish Yahoo luck in its new research pursuits. We also say that common sense dictates the smartest way to eliminate the threat of intrusion is to eliminate a good share of the intruders. This is done with a background check as the first line of defense.
Remember, check them out before you date them.
Fri, August 25th, 2006 - 3:35 pm - By Gordon Basichis
We found this release on Yahoo and thought it was worth noti
TRUE.com Surpasses 10 Million Members This Week
DALLAS, Aug. 24 /PRNewswire/ — With more than 1,400 online dating sites in the nation to choose from, TRUE®, the leading scientifically based online relationship site, is excited to announce that more than 10 million singles have chosen to meet on their site. This marks yet another example of TRUE’s leadership in the online dating industry. The site was started by Founder and CEO Herb Vest in 2003 with a commitment to safety and compatibility, aspects customers are increasingly demanding in online dating services.“We are so excited that TRUE has eclipsed the 10 million member mark and continues to maintain that growth, signing up nearly a thousand new singles per hour,” says Herb Vest, founder and CEO of TRUE. “Our entire TRUE crew is dedicated to helping every member find TRUE love and romance, and we wish all the happiness for every one of them.”
In addition to this announcement, Hitwise — the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service — ranked TRUE the leader in the Lifestyle- Dating category — as the No. 1 Web site in this category for three months in a row. TRUE not only ranked first out of the more than 1,421 sites that Hitwise reported data on in July 2006 for the dating category, but TRUE remained one of the top 100 most-visited sites among U.S. Internet users, with a rank of 72nd as measured by Hitwise.
“It just makes more sense for singles to use TRUE. We’re the leading scientifically-based online relationship site. We are No. 1 in our category according to Hitwise, and we’re increasingly recognized as the safer place to date online,” says Ruben Buell, president of TRUE. “We are honored that people continue to choose our site and that Hitwise acknowledges us month after month. It is proof of our hard work and dedication. We’re committed to helping our members find the love they’re looking for, and our members show their trust by continuing to choose TRUE.”
To paraphrase an old adage, news of the death of online dating appears to have been greatly exaggerated. Hope still springs eternal, fueled by that double edged motivator the desire to full in love. True it seems, like other online dating sites hawking their own particular methodology. True’s compatibility testing has apparently been endorsed by pop psych icon, Psychology Today.
Where True is especially notable is in its mandate that applicants submit to background checks before they are granted membership to the service. While there has been a glitch or two, any online dating service that has compulsary background checks as part of its policy certain deserve our praise. Naturally, with True having ten million people onboard, Corra only wishes it has True’s account.
Nevertheless, as a background checking service that sees much of the bad news, we couldn’t recommend that every serious dating site have their members commit to background screenings. No, we don’t believe it should be the law; we just believe it should be common sense. And given the recent headlines, if you are a single parent responsible for young children, you have to be out of your mind not to check out those romantic prospects you let into your house.
Anyway, we deslighted that there are still legions of hopeful romantics out there and that True has managed to engage some ten million of them. We wish them well, as we wish you all well in your pursuits of romance and happiness.
Just remember–Check them out before you date them.
Thu, August 24th, 2006 - 2:25 pm - By Gordon Basichis
We found this article on CNN Online.
Alabama officials say Karr was licensed for home daycare
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — John Mark Karr bragged to his landlord’s family that “sexually, I am like a wolf,” and said he preferred girls to women when he worked in Costa Rica as an English teacher, his former housemates told The Associated Press.
Karr, now jailed in Los Angeles after his arrest in Thailand, is named in a Colorado warrant as a suspect in the 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey.
Karr traveled around the world in recent years, including brief stays in Honduras and Costa Rica, where he rented a room in 2004 from Canadian John Hall, who teaches at a private university in the capital of San Jose.
Hall, 42, told AP in an exclusive interview that he rented a room to Karr through an Internet posting, but asked him to leave after about five weeks because Karr was saying “rude and inappropriate things” to his Costa Rican wife and stepdaughters, then 16 and 20.
“I threw him out because he was causing problems for them,” Hall said.
One stepdaughter, now 22, told AP that Karr said several times that he liked girls.
Odd conversation
“My mother asked him whether he was looking for a girlfriend in Costa Rica and he answered that he didn’t like adult women, only small ones,” she said, speaking on condition her name not be published. “I thought he meant young women, and never imagined he meant girls.”
During his stay with the family, Karr would often either talk incessantly, or sit in his room and listen to dark rock music, like that of Marilyn Manson, something that also bothered the Halls, who are Pentecostal Christians.
After kicking Karr out, Hall remained suspicious enough to do a computer search to see if he was a sex predator.
“I suspected he was a pedophile. I looked on the Internet to see if there was something on him, but I didn’t find anything,” he said.
The following year, Karr taught for eight months at a small primary school in La Esperanza, Honduras, 60 miles from the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, a former co-worker said.
Renan Marquez said Karr taught second grade, but left because he had a contract with a school in another country; he didn’t know which. Marquez told the AP by telephone that Karr was always “reserved, shy, responsible, organized and punctual.”
Karr “required a lot of discipline” of his second-grade English students, Marquez said. “I never saw anything strange in his treatment of the children.”
Alabama daycare license
Meanwhile, Alabama welfare agency officials said Thursday that Karr kept children at a home day-care center he operated in northwest Alabama.
The Marion County Department of Human Resources issued a license for Karr to begin operating a day-care out of his rural home in June 1997, said John Bradford, a spokesman with the Alabama Department of Human Resources.
He said the sheriff’s department conducted a background check before the license was issued and no problems were found.
Karr didn’t receive any complaints before the two-year license expired in 1999, Bradford told The Associated Press.
“We do know he kept children, but it is really hard to get a handle on the number,” he said.
Karr, 41, has said he was with JonBenet when she was killed in the basement of her home in Boulder, Colorado, in December 1996, but he called her death an accident. (Full story)
Karr was living with his ex-wife in Hamilton at the time of the slaying.
Karr, who was working as a teacher, was arrested last week in Bangkok, Thailand, and flown Sunday to the United States. He is being held in Los Angeles, California.
He has agreed not to fight his transfer to Colorado to face charges of murder, kidnapping and sexual assault of a child in connection with the December 26, 1996 slaying of the child beauty pageant competitor.
While we find the entire Jon Benet murder episode particularly loathesome, we had to point out his ugly example of why you should be running a background check on anyone who is working near your home or who has charge of your children for any amount of time, yet alone the better part of the day.
Apparently Karr was cleared by Alabama for a license. The Sheriff’s department claimed they ran a background check and nothing of consequence registered on the reports. Karr may well have slipped through the cracks on that one. His pedophilliac proclivities also went undiscovered as a teacher. While unfortunate, it is understandable. He had not yet been charged with any crime and, from the official perspective, he had not come under suspicion.
But, overall, the best way to avoid entrusting your children with the wrong people is to run a criminal background check, and include with it a check of the registry of sexual offenders. Every state has a crimnal registery, and so do certain counties. Most sexual registries will report to a central system. While nothing in life is absolute, this criminal background check and the sexual registry are pretty thorough and extremely comprehensive.
Corra always pairs the Sexual Offender’s Registry with the Nationwide Criminal Database Search. We do it as part of our pre-employment screening package, because the last thing we need is to help put a sexual offender in the work place. This search is convenient, cost effective, and it returns quickly. If you are a parent about to put your child into daycare, it’s the least you can do for your child’s safety.
Check them out before you trust them.
Wed, August 23rd, 2006 - 10:25 am - By Gordon Basichis
We found this interesting article in a Profiles International Newsletter
Changing Role of HR:
Forget ‘Warm and Fuzzy’ - Know Costs of Lost TalentJack and Suzy Welch, in the July 17 edition of Business Week, took on the issue of what HR must do to retain the line-item overhead category on most business balance sheets. Any HR professional who has experienced cuts in HR budgets, reductions in staff and outright elimination of HR departments will understand the importance of this move. Every HR professional should read the article, or stop pretending to want a strategic role in the company.
Welch says that HR must first become a functional part of corporate financial management. Quantify. Dollarize. Given the very large, real and documentable costs of vacancies, turnover and legal problems, this is relatively easy. The real payoff, though, is on the positive side of the coin, when HR can track and document the dollars associated with productivity increases, longer tenure, better managers and employee satisfaction. In assuming this role, HR professionals have two major obstacles:
1) Lack of training in finance, numerical reasoning and communication of financial impacts (and worse);
2) Lack of interest in any of these things.
Traditionally, people go into HR because of the warm and fuzzy, intuitive, “health-and-happiness” approach. Welch even counsels, “Drop the socialist &lsquotreat-them-all-the-same’ mentality.” In the words of cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
If you’re still not convinced you can (and must) take this route, answer the Welches’ challenge: “What could possibly be more important than who gets hired, developed, promoted or moved out the door?”
If you’re having trouble with the numerical side of this challenge, make the CFO your ally. As John Sullivan noted in his Workforce Week review of the Welch position, “The CFO is the undisputed king of placing valuations on activities that are difficult to enumerate.” By the way, your CFO is probably as uncomfortable with your warm and fuzzies as you are with the financial reports. But together, you can make things happen.
Look at a specific example of this way of thinking: Talent retention - As far back as most of us care to remember, HR has tracked “turnover” as one of our few consistent metrics. As commonly used, however, turnover is at best a hodgepodge statistic, lumping together the results of current hiring practice, past practice, management change or failure to change, the winds of the economy and goodness knows what else!
Talent retention, on the other hand, is more focused on current practice. According to Leslie Stevens-Huffman, writing for Workforce Week, “Nearly 70 percent of executives say that they view talent retention as important or extremely important.” Identify the costs (both direct and indirect) of replacing talented individuals in your company, learn when new hires are most likely to leave and identify the factors causing them to leave.
Design a program to extend the average life of talent in your company by even a few months and calculate the direct dollar impact. You will find you have reduced the costs of hiring, training, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, management time and negative impacts on coworkers. Simultaneously, you will have improved productivity, job satisfaction and leadership, while holding on to valuable company knowledge and loyalty. The total positive financial impact of your talent retention initiative alone may well pay for your entire HR operation!
Even in the entertainment industry, a business that many thought so creative they needn’t pay attention to things like cost overruns, employee efficiency and careful budgeting, there is pressure to be more cost effective in every way and to always keep an eyes on the bottom line. As competition grows in every industry, there is no business from watching its costs, hidden or otherwise. One cost that is often overlooked is the hidden costs within the workforce. Turnovers and retraining alone can be a drain on an otherwise healthy business.
Then there is the matter of employee theft and substance abuse, that in combo can jeopardize the security of your proprietary systems, your databases and your intellectual properties. With these threats looming over just about any business, it becomes incumbent upon the Human Resources Manager to conduct careful employee screenings while paying close attention to the bottom lines. In this changing age, overviews are not viewed as favorably as specifics.
The devil is in the details, and the details, at least part of them, are in the numbers. As the article suggest, HR Managers should work with the CFO who are after all the numbers people. Working together, you can assure better cost control and overall productivity. Human Resource personnel who learn this and become efficient with numbers will be far more eligible for promotions than those who don’t.
Coupled with watching cost, measuring productivity and assessing the bottom line, always remember to conduct pre-employment background checks on every job candidate. Pre-Employment Screening is the foundation for efficient hiring procedures. We always suggest a criminal background check and a Social Security Trace. You may also want to conduct a DMV search and a variety of civil searches.
So play it by the numbers, and check them our before you hire.
Wed, August 16th, 2006 - 4:02 pm - By Gordon Basichis
Any victim can tell you identity theft is no laughing matter. The hoops you may have to crawl through for weeks or even years to come, in trying to straighten out your life, can elicit far more tears than laughter. These tears would be most certainly tears of frustration as you do anything and everything to reinstate your good name and most probably your good credit.
Those of you who have no identity theft insurance, which means most of you, will spend at least a part of your day notifying businesses and agencies, credit reporting entities and credit card companies. You will write letters that will need to be notarized, claiming you are indeed the unwitting victim and not the architect of some nefarious plot to ruin your own reputation. Meanwhile, until the matter is cleared, you may suffer mightily as your credit score plummets and bills come due. Bills for things you never purchased.. This translates into being denied credit for products and services you really want or paying higher, penalty interest rates for having such lousy credit.
Identity theft begins with nine little numbers. These nine numbers can mean the world to you. They are the nine digits comprising your Social Security Number, and they are as vulnerable to corruption as a politician at a lobbyist convention. Chances are your Social Security has been disseminated, accidentally or for a job. You probably have it in your wallet and on your computer. It may be crumpled up in your trash can; along with the other papers you didn’t bother shredding. With your Social Security Number and your date of birth safely in hand, an identity thief is off to the races.
These are but a few ways thieves gain access to your Social Security Number. There are even creepier ways, including Internet and database hacking. Then there is your new found lover, the Mr. or Miss Possible you met somewhere or even online. This is the person you dated, brought home and after you fell asleep they went roaming your house, rifled your desk or purse, or rummage your computer for your most intimate files. Doesn’t happen? When you discover to your chagrin someone took out a credit card with your name but at a different address, you’ll know the answer.
To an even greater extreme, your Social Security, accompanied by your date of birth can enable an identity thief to not only acquire credit in your name, but maybe a passport, which can used by or sold to some of our more unsavory members of this planet. While there is an adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity, it’s questionable whether there is anything positive about having your identity associated with a terrorist who just made the headlines on CNN.
Losing your identity to someone else will not only damage your credit and create all sorts of legal troubles. You can face psychological difficulties as well. Besides the task at hand to make your life whole once again, you will feel violated and abused. After all, our very identity is based on…well…our identity, and if some louse has usurped it for his own purposes, then it is understandable that until you repair the damages you feel you have lost at least a little piece of yourself. Identity theft is also embarrassing, because it will become incumbent upon you to explain to everyone that matters why your life has been rendered upside down.
Perhaps the worst part about identity theft is it may be quite awhile before you realize how much damage has been done. If someone applied for credit or ordered credit cards in your name but at a different address, months can pass before you are located and notified of your lapses by either the credit service or the collection agency they send after you. It is a rude awakening the day you get that first call and throughout the day begin to wonder what other shoes may begin to drop. More often than not, if someone secured credit in your name, they will secure more, running the limit in many cases. From that day on you are facing the grim ordeal of cleaning up the mess.
Not all identity theft will relate directly to credit acquisition and unlawful purchases. In Border States especially but no exclusively you may find undocumented workers have somehow come upon your social security number. Perhaps, again, you neglected to shred the sensitive information you dumped into your trashcan. Perhaps he bought it from one of hundreds of peddlers who sell phony documents and someone else’s Social Security Numbers to undocumented workers questing increasingly to appear like legitimate immigrants.
In any event, you Social Security Number is not only used by that one undocumented worker. Chances are he has handed it out to his twelve best friends and family members. You don’t believe me? A woman called me recently to inquire as to why different names appeared on a Social Security Trace she ordered as part of a background check. It seemed odd to her that strange names would be appearing along with her employment candidate on the same document. As a favor, I ran her Social Security Number, and to her considerable chagrin, there was a male name attached to her number as well.
Can this be a problem? Often it is fairly benign and nothing comes of it. But then problems can arise, depending on your new bedfellow’s general behavior and whether he or she attempts to either get credit using your Social Security Number, or whether he or she is suddenly identified as part of a drug cartel or stolen car ring. These things do happen, and they happen when you need it least and least expect it. With the world growing increasingly crazy, what with terrorists and miscreants of every stripe the last thing you need is to be the target of a federal manhunt.
All right, so some of this I may have exaggerated. But not by as much as you think. So, how do you protect against it? Do you call the Social Security Administration? Go ahead, and see what happens there. If it wasn’t so pathetic and frustrating it may even be funny. They can’t do much, they will probably tell you. They are understaffed and overmatched and inundated all at the same time.
So what do you do? First get identity theft insurance. It may not protect you, actually, but most policies will notify you when there is suspected abuse of your credit cards and presumably good name. Credit Card Insurance provides services will assist you in repairing the damage done to your credit and reputation. The insurance will also be helpful in shortening the time and effort involved in making everything whole again. There are numerous policies, many given by credit card companies. I would suggest you shop around.
Run a credit check on yourself on a regular basis. Don’t access just one credit card service, but run all three major reporting companies. They are Experian, Trans Union, and Equifax. There are deals all over the Internet where you can run all three credit services for a decent price. It is best to run it at least every six to eight months. Monitoring your credit scores on all three services is money well spent.
Finally, we get down to the cheapest and often the best preemptive defense against identity theft, that is besides doing all the foolish things that were mentioned in the earlier paragraphs. Run your own Social Security Trace. There are a variety of reputable companies that should be willing to run your number. Some may require a consent form, verifying you are who you really say you are. This only assists you in protecting your identity, so I would never let that be an obstacle.
When you run your Social Security Trace you will be able to ascertain what names are attached to your number. Sometimes, due to mixed financial efforts, you might your spouse attached, and that is seldom worth concern. It is the strange name or, in some cases, strange names that should cause some alarm. As I noted earlier, this could be undocumented workers who usurped your Social Security Number to appear as a legal worker. Or, worse case scenario, it could be someone out to use your name for their own personal gain.
Once you know that someone has stolen your number, you can notify the appropriate credit services and authorities that there may well be an interloper. You can request they screen any purchases on you accounts and notify you when there are transactions in other cities. Identity Theft insurance will help with that. You can notify the legal authorities, and maybe they will help you track it down. In any event, the faster you become aware that someone has stolen your identity the greater the chance you will minimize the damage.
Finally, there is no reason to live your life with a siege mentality. It is wise to remain aware and to be sentient, especially with regard to who may have stolen your identity. Remember, credit is great but don’t abuse it. Most importantly don’t allow someone else to abuse it for you.
You have only one name. Keep it to yourself.
Tue, August 15th, 2006 - 2:46 pm - By Gordon Basichis
The New Science of Hiring
From: Inc. Magazine, August 2006 | Page: 90 By: Stephanie Clifford Figure No. 2 The Candidate
Care to dramatically enhance your chance of finding great employees? Trade in your gut instincts for a systematic approach to interviewing, testing, and evaluating job candidates.
What was her company missing? Susan Bowman asked herself that as soon as she plopped into her chair at Tri-anim, a medical-supplies distributor in Sylmar, California. It was two and a half years ago. Bowman had just joined the company as head of human resources, and her highest priority was improving the company’s hiring. When she arrived, the HR department was basically shut out of the hiring of salespeople. Bowman wanted to make it more useful, especially after she noticed some hires were fantastic and others were disappointments.
What Tri-anim was missing–and Bowman fortunately recognized this–was something most employers in America have been missing: Conventional job interviews don’t work.
A typical interview–unstructured, rambling, unfocused–tells the interviewer almost nothing about job candidates, other than how they seem during a couple of meetings in a conference room. But what are these people like late at night and under pressure? What motivates them? How smart are they? Have they handled tough projects? Do they prefer working alone or are they better with a team? Regular interviews assess barely any of this, and in fact are miserable predictors of job success. In technical terms, they have a .2 correlation with predicting success.
Discouraging, isn’t it? It would be–except that industrial and organizational psychologists are on the job, seeking the best ways to evaluate job candidates. A focused three-part approach can make the hiring process as standardized and objective as possible–and can help predict the best performers. The system starts with what is called behavioral interviewing, in which candidates are barraged with tough questions about how they’ve handled specific assignments and problems. Bluffing becomes close to impossible, and the process is based on facts, not feelings. Interviewing is followed by two kinds of tests: cognitive tests, which measure intellectual ability, and personality tests, which are now sophisticated enough that companies can directly compare candidates with their top performers. The third step is asking candidates to do tasks like the ones they’d do on the job.
Most employers will recite over and over that people are the secret to their success–and given that turnover costs about 1.5 times the salary of the employee who moves on, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, they’d better mean it. But it’s astounding how few companies bother with more than improvised, all-but-meaningless interviews to hire their people. “This is a topic that’s been researched to death by the field of industrial and organizational psychology,” says Peter Cappelli, management professor and director of the center for human resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “The amazing thing is how few companies take this seriously. It’s kind of mind-boggling that they would undertake such huge investments and not pay attention to what we know about how to pick out the people who are going to be best.”
Susan Bowman had been studying some of this research. She was pleased to see that Tri-anim had been using the testing company PSI to assess candidates for some positions. She was less pleased that the test criteria hadn’t been updated in six years and that some of the company’s hiring managers didn’t use the tests. Bowman immediately had PSI reassess the best and worst performers in a number of areas and develop profiles of the top performers. The goal is to compare candidates with the ideal. Tri-anim salespeople, for example, need to be not just energetic and detail-oriented (pretty common in salespeople) but also unusually independent: They spend a lot of time alone.
Bowman began requiring the PSI assessments as a last step in the managerial, IT, and sales hiring processes. They’ve already turned up surprising results. Recently, a recruiter and a manager were disagreeing over two candidates for a position–until the PSI reports came back. “The results were really staggeringly different. It was a combination of not only skill sets, but that one individual’s people skills were so much lower than the manager had anticipated and the other candidate scored much higher,” Bowman says.
She has now trained all of Tri-anim’s hiring managers in behavioral interviews. “Structured interviews with behaviorally based questions really allow us to drill down,” she says. In a daylong session, the managers learned the tenets of behavioral interviews and practiced asking open-ended questions. Though she doesn’t use work assessments–and that could increase the company’s hiring success even further–these two steps paint rich, objective portraits of candidates. Even the sales hiring managers, who didn’t want to abandon their random interviewing tactics, have become believers as turnover has dropped. “We all want to hire the best,” Bowman says. “This gives really good, objective information that allows the manager to take the halo off the applicant.”
Step 1
In which the bored interviewer turns intrepid interrogator
Other than people’s wan complexions beneath fluorescent office lights, there’s not much that’s consistent in typical job interviews. Topics discussed completely depend on the interviewer, who might spend an hour discussing a candidate’s alma mater, the recent weather, or even himself. He could dismiss the candidate before she’s even started speaking because she’s overweight or overdressed, or he could lose focus because he’s having a rotten day. Afterward, the interviewer is left with a resume and a vague sense of…how the candidate acts during an interview. Is she qualified? Dunno, but her resume looks nice. Would she be good at the job? Well, she likes to sail, which is fun.
.2 Correlation between conventional interviewing and successful hiring
As psychologists have pointed out, traditional interviews produce a subjective, acutely narrow view of a job candidate. That view is likely biased–studies have shown interviewers tend to prefer candidates similar to them, judge candidates on fewer criteria than they think they’re judging them on, and tend to let biases about matters like race and gender get in the way. “Everybody thinks they’re much better interviewers than they are,” says Ben Dattner, a New York City industrial and organizational psychologist.
Still, the interview is a brilliant tool if you make certain changes to it. Behavioral interviews have almost triple the correlation of conventional interviews with job success. (To gauge if a hire is successful, academics use measures like the dollar value of an employee’s contribution to the company, his or her relative share in overall output, and later performance reviews, promotions, and raises.) Behavioral interviewing involves, by definition, a group of interviewers defining qualities needed for a job, asking candidates to give past examples of how they’ve demonstrated those qualities, asking the same questions of each candidate, and taking notes throughout. The premise is that what someone has done in past jobs is a superior indicator of what he or she will do in future jobs. It’s the same idea behind checking references.
To see how structured interviews work, take a look at Hope Lumber & Supply, where HR chief Bill Vogt credits much of his company’s growth to behavioral interviewing. Hope, which is based in Tulsa, brings in $1.2 billion a year selling building supplies to contractors. Eight years ago, when the company was making a fifth of that, Vogt and the owners predicted, correctly, that the housing market was about to surge. If they hired the right managers, they could ride that wave.
Following behavioral-interviewing maxims, Vogt starts by talking to people intimate with the job and deciding what qualities are necessary for it. He has a standard template for what he wants in managers: leadership, a drive to make money for the company and for themselves, ambition, and past operational responsibility. Depending on the challenges of the specific business unit, he’ll alter the template.
Then he comes up with open-ended questions that get at the desired qualities. Behavioral interviews use questions that are rooted in the past–”Tell me about a time when”–rather than hypotheticals–”What would you do if?” Vogt digs deep into his candidates’ work experience. “I get into the current operation,” he says. “What did you inherit? What were the sales margins, accounts payable, percent current status, inventory like? What did you do with that, what did you achieve? Clearly, we’re looking for achievers and winners and people very knowledgeable of their operation.” Specific questions like these, in addition to assessing candidates’ skills, combat resume fraud–it’s pretty difficult to lie about sales margins and inventory turns.
Ideally, a team of people will meet with the candidate. That minimizes the importance of any one person’s reaction, good or bad. Vogt arranges a panel interview for general questions, and then sets up one-on-one interviews focused on specific areas. Vogt asks about EEOC compliance and OSHA incidents; the CFO asks about accounting details; the COO asks logistics questions. In any behavioral interview, questions should be job-related, to keep the interview relevant and to avoid discrimination complaints. To the extent possible, every candidate should be asked the same questions. Interviewers should take notes, and should get together to discuss their views just after the candidate leaves.
Step 2
In which the candidate relives college-entrance tests
As helpful as behavioral interviews are, they’re even more effective when combined with employment tests, many of which are now administered online. These are given to candidates to assess either cognitive abilities (cognitive tests are filled with SAT-like verbal and math questions) or personality traits (personality tests include preferential questions like “Would you rather spend a night at home alone than go to a crowded party?” or biographical questions like “Were you a class officer in high school?”). While cognitive tests have a slightly closer correlation with job success, personality tests are useful both as a basis for interview questions and for subsequent development. For the best results, companies should use both sorts of tests or a single test that combines the two elements. (For a roster of tests, see “Choose Your Weapon“.)
Many testing companies today can do impressive comparisons of candidates against existing employees–the goal being to essentially clone top performers. “The assessments allow you to really identify what is different between our stars and our slugs,” says James Hazen, an organizational psychologist and the owner of Applied Behavioral Insights, a consulting firm based in Wexford, Pennsylvania. Hazen uses several tests with his clients.
2,500 Number of cognitive and personality tests on the market
Assessments can turn up some fascinating findings. Dayton Freight Lines, a trucking company based in Dayton, Ohio, had been having trouble with drivers. Customers reported that some drivers were rude. Some drivers were complaining over their CB radios. Some workers’ productivity was falling, or they were late on their deliveries. Denise Noel, the director of quality at Dayton Freight, was stumped. These drivers all had good qualifications and had interviewed well, yet she saw no way to predict who would be an outstanding performer on the road. Finally she brought in a company called Hogan Assessment Systems and had the company present its extensive research on truck drivers.
Noel had assumed all truck drivers were similar. But Hogan had found two distinct truck-driver profiles. The top city performers are social and gregarious, great with customers–which makes sense, because they pick up and drop off multiple times a day. The best line-haul drivers are quiet and introspective–which is good for people who never see a customer. Noel has adjusted her hiring now, having candidates take the Hogan assessment to find the best job for them. Turnover for drivers has fallen to 22 percent (the industry average is 116 percent). “You just think a driver is a driver, and that’s not true,” Noel says. “We just didn’t look at that part of the hiring process enough.”
Discussing the results of assessment tests with candidates–or even giving them the full report–is increasingly popular. “The trend has really been to lay it all on the table between the second and third interviews,” says James Hazen. This gives candidates the chance to explain themselves, gives the interviewer a chance to address weak spots, and, if someone is hired, points out ways he or she might best be managed.
There are, by some estimates, 2,500 employment tests on the market. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is using the wrong test. A classic example is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, that ubiquitous test that sorts people into 16 personality categories. Myers-Briggs, a test created by a Pennsylvania woman who was fascinated by how her merry personality differed from that of her straightforward husband, has a weak record of predicting job success. Indeed, its publisher warns that “It is unethical and in many cases illegal to require job applicants to take the Indicator if the results will be used to screen out applicants.”
With so many tests available, it’s not a surprise that employers use tests meant for other purposes, like Myers-Briggs (which is fine, by the way, for employee development), or even design their own tests. But choosing the wrong one can mean dismissing qualified candidates and even getting sued for discrimination. Employers need to know whether a test is appropriate for hiring, what it measures, and how it’s designed, along with making sure it’s legal. Psychologists evaluate a psychological test by two measures, called reliability and validity. Reliability examines whether items that supposedly measure the same thing (agreeableness, say, or conscientiousness) correlate highly with one another. Validity asks, in this case, for proof that scores on tests are related to success in specific jobs. “If you go out on the Net and look at the hundreds of tests out there, a very small percentage have validity data,” says Seymour Adler, a senior vice president at Aon Consulting and a teacher of organizational psychology at New York University.
Recent psychological research supports going beyond validity and reliability data. First, both for legal purposes and to ensure usefulness, make certain the test is designed for selecting–as distinct from developing or training–employees. It should be created or adapted for the workplace, not for clinical or medical diagnosis. Pre-employment tests are more predictive when they compare an individual’s score against a group (they use “normative” scales, in the lexicon) instead of just presenting it on its own (”ipsative” scales). For the best results, too, employers should continue to evaluate and revalidate the tests within their companies to make sure they are still predicting top performers.
A note about testing for hourly employees. There, employers might care most about who’s punctual and honest. Rock Bottom Restaurants, a 29-store chain based in Louisville, Colorado, switched three years ago from a pencil-and-paper application for its hourly employees to a test from Unicru. (Kenexa and PreVisor are two other assessment companies focusing on entry-level and hourly applicants.) For waiters, it tests for sociability and team orientation; for the back of the house, it asks applicants whether they’ve worked in on-their-feet jobs before; for all job candidates, it looks at integrity. Applicants in each pool–cooks, bartenders, and so on–are ranked according to their assessment scores, which gives the Rock Bottom management a good starting point. “It’s not 100 percent predictive, and that’s why we interview people, but it’s at least an indicator,” says Ted Williams, senior vice president of the brewery division at Rock Bottom. Rock Bottom’s turnover for its 6,000 hourly employees has dropped by 20 percent, which Williams thinks is largely because of the system.
Step 3
In which the process starts to imitate finding World War II spies
In 1943, a pretty countryside residence in Fairfax, Virginia, was renamed Station S and repurposed as a testing site for Office of Strategic Services recruits. In an atmosphere of intense secrecy–candidates were stripped of their clothes and given military fatigues, then driven in a windowless van to Fairfax, where they would invent a cover story and fake name–the OSS studied their performance during job simulations. One test had “couriers” giving candidates a map, which they’d need to memorize in eight minutes. Other exercises included interrogating ersatz prisoners of war, devising propaganda plans, and recovering papers from an agent’s room (and, aggravatingly, getting interrupted by a rifle-wielding “German” midway). The tests went on for three and a half days.
Inspired by that work-based approach, corporations such as AT&T starting using assessment centers to select executives. By the late 1950s, the candidate in the gray flannel suit was performing in-basket assessments in which he’d be graded on how he handled a set of letters, papers, tasks, and telephone calls that mimicked what he’d get on the job.
Today’s work samples are essentially updates of those AT&T tests. Work samples are a proven predictor of success and can be simple to arrange. A company can design its own by laying out the criteria for a job and asking a candidate to perform a task based on those criteria. For example: “Explain how you would sell this product to Target, step by step,” or “Tell me how you’d improve these lines of C++ code.”
4 Number of weeks capital H Group dedicates to hiring a single consultant
At Sterling Communications, a technology PR firm in Los Gatos, California, CEO Marianne O’Connor knows her account reps have to be good at understanding technical information, at figuring out how to pitch to a media outlet, and at writing. Logical enough. So she’s started giving job candidates a two-hour test before she even meets with them. It describes a client’s technology, identifies a target publication and its readership, and asks a candidate to distill the salient technical points and write a pitch to the magazine. Three staffers review the pitch, and that decides whether the candidate will get an interview. “If they can’t write in my business, it’s not going to work,” O’Connor says.
On the complicated end of the work-sample spectrum, Seymour Adler, the Aon Consulting psychologist, has created a four-hour online exercise called Leader, which Motorola and other companies use to test would-be executives. Candidates see an in box with e-mails that came in the night before, answer phone calls and listen to voice mails, and have access to reports and research. They’re asked to tackle tasks like ones they would see on the job, such as solving a conflict between two underlings or leading a team of workers in creating a presentation for the CEO. At the end, Adler’s team assesses the candidates on whatever areas the company is curious about–decisiveness, leadership, and so forth–and issues a report to the company. A company called Development Dimensions International offers similar exercises; these take place at one of its 75 assessment centers rather than online. Half-day and full-day job simulations cost from $4,000 to $12,000.
And finally…
Put it all together– without riling your candidates
Dan Weinfurter runs Capital H Group, a human resources consulting firm in Chicago, though he’s not an HR guy but an entrepreneur at heart. He founded the accounting and consulting firm Parson Group, which hit No. 1 on the Inc. 500 in 2000 with a four-year growth rate of 27,992 percent, and sold it four years ago for $55 million. Before that, he was second in command at Alternative Resources, an IT staffing company that was a two-time Inc. 500 honoree. For all he knew about running a company, however, Weinfurter came to the conclusion that he didn’t know much about hiring. “I thought I was pretty good at interviewing,” he says, “but I was no better, and maybe was worse, than other people. If you’re just going through it and trying to guess, you’ll guess right some of the time. But you won’t be able to guess right often enough to grow a business from scratch.”
So at Capital H, he unleashed his on-staff psychologists, who created a hiring system that’s a textbook example of the latest hiring research. Let’s say Capital H has an opening for a consultant. A group of candidates are interviewed by telephone by the HR manager (or by Weinfurter himself, if the position is very senior), and candidates with appropriate skills and backgrounds are then passed to a local office to meet with local executives. He or she takes the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, a popular and well-validated cognitive-ability test, and the Devine Inventory, which measures the applicant’s traits and tendencies against those of existing Capital H consultants. (See “Let’s Turn the Tables” for a sample of questions from Watson-Glaser.) About one in four candidates are then flown to Chicago headquarters, where they spend a full day in behavioral interviews with multiple executives. Finally, applicants are asked to choose a presentation they’ve done in the past and give that to a group of Capital H execs back at the local office in a work-sample exercise. The executives discuss the candidates until they reach consensus.
Weinfurter figures he spends up to four weeks, and tons of his workers’ billable hours, per interview. But he estimates the cost of hiring a bad consultant can be in the millions, considering not just salary but also missed sales and lost clients. “I think the hiring process is the most important process in business, but it’s probably the least disciplined in terms of how it’s executed across American business,” he says.
People who study hiring, and business owners who are passionate about the subject, love to see systems like Capital H’s. Candidates may not feel the same way. Certainly you’ll have to make concessions in some cases–say you’re trying to recruit a CFO from a rival company. “If they’ve already done a job like this, what’s the point of the test? It’s not obvious you want to give this to everyone and for every job,” Peter Cappelli at Wharton notes. In every case, candidates will have a better attitude toward the process, and the company, if they believe that the hiring methods are respectful, fair, and smart. So use appropriate cognitive tests–don’t ask accountants basic math questions. Use only tests designed for the workplace, so that the questions clearly deal with business situations and seem relevant. And explain why you’re adopting an approach that to some candidates will seem overwrought: to be fair and quantitative.
There will always be skeptics about this approach to hiring, people who believe their gut tells them more than any structured interview or test could. And while Bill Vogt or Denise Noel or Dan Weinfurter could offer testimonials about the new science of hiring, the point is not that this system has worked in a handful of cases. It’s that hundreds of studies have confirmed that testing and structured interviews do a much better job at finding good workers than do regular interviews. Given that, the gut-feel proponents start to seem like people who eschew antibiotics in favor of good old-fashioned bloodletting.
Maybe people don’t like to believe that something as crucial to a business as hiring can be reduced to a series of processes. After all, we rely on feeling and judgment to get through our lives, whether to fall in love, keep safe on dark streets, or assess business partners. This science-based approach isn’t perfect. It won’t anoint every superstar, and it won’t bar the door to all of the mediocre players. What it will do is give employers a fuller, more balanced, and fairer view of candidates, and give them a much better shot at hiring the best people. It’s still up to employers to make the call on whether to hire or to pass, and that’s where feeling and judgment still play a part. But that part now comes after employers have gathered all of the facts.
Stephanie Clifford is a staff writer.
Having been to more than our fair share of lame interviews. we are happy to see the Human Resource hiring practices are being galvanized into a very pragmatic and at least a partially scientific approach. Using new methods to assess a job candidate’s skills and character will go a long way in reducing employee turnover and the costs that go with it. They should also reduce the unreasonable faux pas that can embarrass your company while alienating your clients and customer base.
Nevertheless, as the end of the day, nothing is as important as verifying all scientific and psychological tests by conducting fact based pre-employment background checks. Preemployment screening will provide valuable information concerning a candidate’s criminal, civil and financial past. These background records are so important not only in the facts they reveal but in helping HR managers assess the behavior pattern of a candidate.
A combination of preemployment background checks will certainly demonstrate a behavior pattern that an experienced researcher and investigator may help you interpret. If your current pre-employment screening service is inaccessible or unwilling to assist you with this, then perhaps you may want to seek out another service. Corra for example.
We are major believers in adapting to not only the work place but to the general global environment. Part of that adaptation means utilizing whatever methods are available that will help you reduce employee turnover while limiting your legal liabilities. And as with so many other things, the best defense is a good offense, meaning you should be proactive in your choices and in seeking background checks, rather than wait for something terrible to happen, before you start shopping around.
Remember, Check Them Out Before You Hire.
Thu, August 10th, 2006 - 4:14 pm - By Gordon Basichis
We found this most interesting article in the Orange County Register:
Check background before diving into a relationship
Single again column
The Orange County Register
“The only sure protection against fraud by someone you are involved with is to look deep into their past before they look deep into your eyes,” says Rhoda Cook, national coordinator for CUFF (Citizens United to Find Fugitives), a nonprofit company that deals with sweetheart fraud.
When older singles venture into the dating world, most potential mates they meet are strangers. Before becoming romantically involved, singles need to protect themselves by learning as much about the stranger as possible.
Barbara, like many older singles, was lonely, bored and looking for love. “I sent out those signals,” she said. Barbara went to a dance and met a man who was an excellent swing and ballroom dancer. “He seemed so nice, polite, and was tall, good looking, younger than me, and wow!”
He told her he was from another state and staying in a motel while looking for an apartment to rent. Barbara said, “After a week of hot pursuit, he ended spending the night, then the next, which continued into the weekend. From what he said, I thought he was leaving on Monday when I went back to work.”
Much to Barbara’s surprise, she came home from work to find he had purchased groceries and cooked her dinner. “Before I knew it, he was living there,” Barbara said.
“After two months, we began arguing constantly. I did a little computer research, and what I found out astounded me. He had a rap sheet in another state.”
Barbara asked him to leave. “He insisted we could work things out, he loved me, he cried, and yes he was persuasive. Then, another four months of constant arguing. In February, I was able to get him out, but it’s been a nightmare since.”
Barbara has a restraining order against him. He has harassed her family, friends and her at her work. “Now he’s in Central Jail in Los Angeles on a skipped felony arrest warrant,” she said. She fears he will be released and come after her.
Barbara admits that loneliness foolishly clouded her thinking. The point of her story is: Had she had a background check done on this man before allowing him to spend the night, this nightmarish experience could have been avoided.
What are the options for singles seeking background checks?
Cook says private investigators are the most reliable sources of background information. “Because there is no national database of criminal records, civil judgment cases, or sex offenders, the information must be ferreted out by a competent investigator who knows how to sense inconsistencies in the subject’s information,” she said.
Vern McGarry, an O.C. private investigator (www.blueskiesdetectiveagency.com), says, “Make two background inquires at a minimum in the counties the person has lived in for at least the past 10 years. A criminal background check and then a civil background check. Unlike credit reports, criminal and civil records are public information and do not require waivers or permission from the subject in question to be run.” McGarry says the cost for both reports should be no more than $150.
Mark Simon, another O.C. private investigator, msimoninv@cox.net, says, “Databases available to private investigators allow us to gather information necessary for a complete and accurate investigation. This data was not available in the past at the affordable price in today’s market.” Simon’s company charges $75 for a basic check without a written report.
A search on Google reveals hundreds of services that conduct background checks. Which one to choose? A company called Consumer-Guide did a thorough study of services offered online and recommends the ones they feel most reliable on their Web site: http://consumer-guide.to/Background.Checks.
CUFF’s Web site, www.straightshooter.net, provides a comprehensive search for $59 that includes criminal and civil case searches nationwide.
For older singles, the money spent in checking the background of a potential mate could be the wisest investment they ever make.
This truly is a good article about a rotten situation. It is terrible that anyone, yet alone seniors, in search of romance and ocmpanionship must fall victim to predators and scoundrels. Corra, as a pre-employment background checking service, and online dating service, getes to hear more than our share of horror tales. That’s why we always caution people to check people out before you date them, rather than after, which is usually just to verify all the sad facts that you have already sensed.
We applaued CUFF, which is mentioned in the articl, for its efforts to track down fugitives. We may disagree with its national director about private invetigators being the most reliable sources for backgorund information. As with anything else, some are and some aren’t. We know fellow background checking services that are reputable, reliable and have access to terrific resources for background information. That said, we should also add that one of the partners at Corra retains is private investigation license, so we are pretty impartial with respect to background checking services, good and bad.
The main thing is when you are about to enter a romantic relationship, check the person out before you invest heart and soul and risk losing, material assets, to say nothing of life and limb. It’s a brutal world out there, and also a beautiful one. The trick is to be discriminating and to take at least the same precautions you would take when buying a new plasma screen TV. Do the research.
So for all of you out there, you old singles, especially, take this wonderful article to heart and order a background check on your romantic interest, before you get involved. As the article notes, it’s the wisest investment you will ever make.
Check Them Out Before You Date Them.