At a time when security is becoming a concern for many companies, it is important to recognize that you may be subject to a background check before receiving an offer of employment. When filling out the application during the interview process, you should be up front about your criminal record and reveal any legal problems you have had in the past. Many companies will allow you to explain any felonies on your record but if they are discovered during a background check you will likely never get that chance.

You can be subject to different degrees of background check according to the importance of your job. If you will be handling sensitive information such as financial records or social security numbers, the check into your background will be quite thorough. Also, most state and federal jobs require a background check regardless of the type of work you will be doing.

Part of the background check is running your social security number to see if you have a criminal record. This is a very basic background check, similar to a credit check and can be cheaply and easily performed. A more thorough background check may involve a third-party company that contacts the people who know you or that you have known in your life to find out about more about your character. For example, one evening I opened the door to an FBI agent who wanted to talk to me about my next door neighbor. My neighbor may have been in the process of applying for a government job or he may have been up for a position that required a security clearance. In this case the background check will involve more information than a social security number can reveal because a person can be shady without having a criminal record.

Most information you can find in a background check is publicly available if you know where to look. But there are companies who charge a small fee to perform this service and many corporations will use their services to save themselves the time and effort of performing the check themselves. In the case of a corporation who does a high volume of hiring, contracting an outside company to perform the background check is more cost-effective in the long run.

If you are concerned about the information that may be revealed about you in a background check you can contact a company who provides this service to get you the information. Like obtaining a copy of your own credit report it is helpful to know what you are dealing with so that you can address any issues that may come up during the hiring process.

When people ask why people lie they seldom realize the complexity of the question. My 14 year old nephew asked me why people lie the other day and although I have almost thirty years experience in forensic psychology, it took all of my resources to answer this question. The truth is, as I told my nephew, that there is no simple reason why people lie, and there isn’t even a simple way to say what a lie is. Is an omission a lie? Maybe, maybe not but if it is, it certainly isn’t in the same way that a frank statement against fact is a lie. And is flattering someone, pretending that their dress looks better on them than it does for example, a lie? Before we can really answer the question of why people lie we must be able to answer these questions and there are no easy answers.

Some people lie because they can’t help it and these are called pathological liars. They are so obsessed with being seen as interesting, unusual or perhaps different than they are. They are able and willing to make up the most outrageous stories about their lives, stories that no one will believe, to try to convince themselves that things are different than they really are. Of course this isn’t quite the same reason why people lie in general but it is close. A simple answer to why people lie? Usually to impress others or to get out of a bad situation. Maybe they want to get away with not having done their homework or having been late for work or maybe they want others to think that they are more accomplished than they are so that they can have more respect from their peers. It is hard to tell in most situations why people lie but it is easier to tell that they are lying.

One of the best cues to seeing that someone is lying is their body language. No matter why people lie they tend to do it in certain ways that are easy to see once you learn the trick to it. They don’t necessarily fidget a lot but often they will get stiffer than normal. To contrast this they might use exaggerated gestures or speak with different language than they usually do. The bottom line is that there are almost no people who can tell you why people lie but anyone can learn to detect when other people are lying.