Background Checks

Anyone here have any familiarity with corporate background checks and the use of Google.

I have a neighbor/friend who is in finance and looking for a job. This poor guy was a victim of a crime but because the other individual was crazy, there was a cross complaint and an arrest. My friend required surgery the same day, the other party was uninjured. The charges against our friend were dismissed and, he is, in fact now the DA'S star witness.

Here's the rub, this guy is now looking for a job, a high paying six figure job. His concern is that when you google him, this story pops up on page 1. He's so concerned that he's considering hiring a company like Reputation Defenders to try to handle this. My husband, who is in IT, doesn't think it will help much and is of the opinion that, if asked, you simply explain the facts.

Anyone here have any thoughts or experiences about whether this guy should be so worried. For the record, he really is a squeaky clean guy.

Please don't quote.

Message edited 2/19/2016 1:08:54 PM.

Re: Background Checks

Is it the background check he is worried about or a google search?

There isn't much he can do about the background check. The arrest will come up but if it's only that one incident and the charges were dropped, I doubt it would be a problem.

Reputation defenders is a waste of money. Anything they do, can be done yourself. The results aren't immediate either. So if it's something he needs done now, it's not possible. Reputation defenders creates new content to push old content down. It's fairly easy to do but it takes time for the new content to get ranked at the top of the search. The bad content still comes up, it'll just be on page 2 or 3 of the search results. Also, if you change a few search terms (which most HR departments know) the bad content may still come right up on the first page.

Edited -

oops, hit reply to soon lol. You can always try to request the search engines remove the content (which if they do, it would be immediate but temporary) or another option is asking the authors to update their articles with the out come. That might be a better option as the results would be permanent.

Message edited 2/19/2016 1:15:39 PM.

Re: Background Checks

The Google search is his concern. The background checks not so much, as he has a letter from the DAs office explaining the matter. He's concerned that people are googling him and if interviewed, not getting to the next step.

Re: Background Checks

ok, so I would start working on it 2 ways

1st - Send an email to try getting the authors of the news articles to print an update. Most of the time they are understanding and want to print the truth. If you get them to agree to remove or update it, you can ask google to remove or update their results.

2nd - I would start working on submitting things that will outrank the current search results in google. I'll FM you some examples.

Message edited 2/19/2016 3:00:59 PM.