In Syed v. M-I, LLC,the Ninth Circuit held that the Fair Credit and Reporting Act rights notice cannot be combined with any other notice or agreement. In determining that the violation was willful, the Court held that the “ordinary meaning of ‘solely’ is alone; singly…
Posts by Category: Employment Screening
Pre-Employment Background Screening 101 – Mitigate Your Risk
Attorney Montserrat Miller’s article is a poignant reminder employers about practices they should implement to help mitigate risk in the hiring process. She wrote “a series of recent class action complaints against employers leads me to write about what employers can…
Philadelphia to Prohibit Employer Questions About an Applicant’s Wage History
In an effort to advance wage equality, the Philadelphia Fair Practices Ordinance is being amended to make the city the first to ban employers from asking about the wage history of job applicants. The law also prohibits reliance on wage history in determining the wages…
UK Votes to Leave the EU: Data Protection Standards Unlikely to be Affected
The UK has decided to withdraw its membership from the European Union. Despite the result, data protection standards are unlikely to be affected. The full details of how and when the UK will negotiate its exit from the EU is still unclear. The process for withdrawal…
Top Candidates Are Gone Within 10 Days … So Assign Each A ‘Hire-By-Date’
If business people ran recruiting … they would assign a “hire by date” to each must-hire candidate, because these valuable in-demand candidates are likely to be quickly out of the job market.Unfortunately, many recruiting leaders and hiring managers mistakenly assume…
Rooting Out Jerks Is More Important Than Hiring Superstars, New Study Shows
Firing your worst employee is worth more than twice as much as hiring a superstar, claims new Harvard research. “While a top 1% worker might return $5,303 in cost savings to a company through increased output, avoiding a toxic hire will net an estimated…
California Considers Criminal History in Employment Decisions
Continuing the nationwide crackdown on the use of criminal history as a factor in employment decisions, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) released proposed regulations for employers with new prohibitions on the practice. In addition…
The Way Forward for Federal Background Investigations
The Federal Government announced a series of changes to modernize and strengthen the way we conduct background investigations for Federal employees and contractors and protect sensitive data. These changes include the establishment of the National Background…
Background Checks More Cumbersome Than Ever
With companies facing hacking and age-old threats like workplace violence, a thorough system for screening out problem employees is more important than ever. But a laudable push by policymakers to get people “back to work” and make progress on issues such…
Bad Background Check Leads to Class Actions, Including Against Freeman Webb
A man who says he was wrongfully fired over false information in a background check has filed a pair of class-action lawsuits in federal court, including one against the prominent real estate firm Freeman Webb. Tyrone Jude was hired as a maintenance man at a Lebanon…




