If I’m convicted of a crime, will my employer find out?

If you’re convicted of a crime and your employer does a background check then it’s a public record and your employer will see it. In addition to not even being convicted of a crime, just being arrested and charged with a crime if your employer looks that information is available. It’s available usually online based on the booking records which are publicly produced and put out there.

In addition, there’s a criminal history that’s run based on your name, social security number and date of birth. That’s the formal record and that’s the record that 15 years ago, ten years ago, that we were most concerned with because that was the only record.

That record has almost become secondary. If your employer uses a service to do a background check, they’ll check all of these computer database records. For example the local county has a record which says that you’ve been arrested, what you’ve been charged with and what you’ve been convicted of.

In those records though, one would have to know where it happened; in other words, if you live in Virginia and you got arrested in Myrtle Beach and your employer back in Virginia may have no reason to look for that record in Myrtle Beach.

They could, however, do a background check using your date of birth and social security number and then that would come up on the traditional criminal history. In addition, sometimes just by doing a Google search there’s information about your arrest so there are three sources to be concerned about concerning arrest records and conviction records.