Are Background Checks Necessary For IT Workers?

Ken van Wyk, principal consultant with KRvW Associates, says companies should be running background checks on IT workers, and they also should be upfront about it with those being investigated.

"If you're going to do it, you need to be careful about it and justify it and make sure everyone understands why you're doing it and it remains out in the open," he says. Companies that haven't done background checks before shouldn't just focus on new hires, but should go back and run checks on current employees, as well, he adds.

Once a background check is done, IT managers then need to figure out what prior bad deeds raise a warning flag and what can be dismissed as simple indiscretions or mistakes.

Howard Schmidt, a former White House security adviser and now president and CEO of R&H Security Consulting, says IT managers need to sit down beforehand with the human resources department and corporate attorneys to come up with policies on what is acceptable past behavior and what isn't.

"You have to have criteria that isn't discriminatory," says Schmidt. "If someone had a [driving under the influence] 20 years ago or they were arrested for marijuana in the 60s you check the circumstances. Was it a drinking problem, or was it one night out celebrating a birthday? It's the repeating of a failure to comply with the rule of law that I would be looking for."

Don't limit the background check to criminal records alone. Schmidt notes that thorough investigations such as those done with key government employees involve checks of criminal, financial, and education records.

Hiring managers also need to consider the position that the person is looking to take in the company. If an IT worker is going to have root access to IT systems or access to confidential information or critical applications, then he or she needs to have a pretty clean record. But Schmidt warns that hiring managers need to consider what positions someone might move into from the one they're being hired for. Moving up the ladder and taking on more responsibility might call for another background check.

"You look at the whole person, and not just the particular job they're going to be doing at that particular moment," he says. "It's not a 100% guarantee, but it's vitally important to know not just the person's skill but the ethical side of the person, their personal interaction skills. They're all factors into the whole person that you're hiring."