Have you ever gone to apply for a job and were surprised to find out that your employer wants to do a credit history check on you before you can be hired? I went with my sister because she wanted to apply for a job and on the application, it asked for permission to run her credit history. This got me thinking about the reasons a business has to run credit checks on people that apply for a job. I mean, its understandable that an employer has to do a criminal background check to find out if the person they are looking to hire is reliable. I just do not see a reason for anyone to be running a credit check on the people who apply for jobs.
There are a few correlations that I can think of between having bad credit and work performance. Lets see if its really necessary for your employer to run a credit history check on you.
Putting myself in the shoes of an employer, there are a few signals having bad credit can send to me. First of all, I just want to make clear that not everyone that has bad credit is a bad person. Sometimes things just do not go the way we want to and debt mounts up right in front of our eyes.
Usually (not all the time), a person that has a bad credit history is seen to be an unreliable person. If I was an employer, I would want my employees to be responsible beings that get things done on time. Credit history is easy to ruin because you have to make payments on time. Smart people do not take on debt they cannot pay off easily. I guess what employers are looking for is a person who has the judgment to make good decisions for themselves and anyone they are working for.
As I have mentioned earlier, having bad credit history does not always mean that the person is unreliable or cannot be trusted. Sometimes things happen that are outside of our control. This is where I believe employers need to be more understandable. While not having perfect credit gives out some signals, these signals can be scrambled by factors that are not in a person’s control.
Things that should be more important in getting hired are employment history, references and work ethics. Still you will find a few businesses that give more preference to useless things such as checking credit history of their prospective employees.
In my opinion, one should just avoid applying for employment at such places. If the employers are not smart enough to realize that credit is a sensitive thing and offers no real insight into how a person might perform their job duties, they do not deserve to have the best and the brightest. I am positive there are many more jobs waiting to be filled that do not require a credit history check from its applicants.
If enough people start declining jobs due to this reason, these companies might actually think about what they are doing. There is no faster way to get things done than to hurt the bottom line of any business. They will spur into action and make things happen if they realize that they are losing smart applicants because of bad hiring policies.
Have you had any experience with an employer that required you to provide your credit history before they thought about hiring you? Feel free to share your experience in the comments below.