In a nutshell: yes, they do. Recruiters conduct rigorous background checks on every candidate and at every interview stage using services like Checkpeople. For some top-level jobs, there may be as many as five rounds.
Today’s tech industry is what the railway service used to be during Carnegie’s time. And sometimes, freshly-hired employees may feel tempted to leak sensitive corporate information to their company’s biggest competitor.
Tech Companies Check Their Candidates’ Social Media Profiles
If you are a computer whiz fresh out of college and you think you have landed a suitable job opening with one of the world’s tech giants, make sure that your social image is as clear as mountain dew in summer.
If you do not have a visible social media presence, work on that. Fill your accounts with enough relevant and presentable information prior to filing your application. For low-level jobs, recruiters mostly check the candidates’ LinkedIn profile. Your LinkedIn image is as essential to your successful application as your well-written resume, if not more so.
Ensure that your Facebook and your LinkedIn profiles are free or any content, visual or written, that may discredit you, even indirectly. Stay neutral and do not engage in discussions of sensitive or controversial issues.
On the other hand, raise the banner for any worthy cause related to climate change and environmental protection. The greener your social image looks, the better.
The Higher You aim, the More Rigorous the Background Checks Become
If you already have substantial experience in the tech industry, you may want to apply for the position of department head at least. In this case, you can expect your potential employer to carry out a far more comprehensive background check on you.
Apart from the social media image examination discussed above, they’d probably run the premium version of a people check service to find out any bits of information that may reveal a darker side of your past. These negative records could be related to your financial discipline and your track record.
It may sound strange, but coding gurus and even programming geniuses sometimes pay their rent or bills a bit late. Not because they are short on cash – far from it. They have simply been too busy working on the next big project.
Similarly, tech companies will seldom hire someone with a long history of traffic violations. This candidate comes across as unreliable, no matter how good he is with computers. Not only may he turn up late for important meetings, but he also risks getting injured because of his reckless driving.
Do You Want to Be a Manager? Your Employer Will Check Your Social Skills
As you may know, people check services can scrape gigabytes of publicly available information per second to find any violations the job applicant has committed. These also include any civil and criminal offenses that the candidate may have committed in the past.
Contemporary people search engines are so powerful that they can dig out police records from decades ago. Suppose you had an argument with your college sweetheart a few years ago, and she called the police on you. You may think that the matter has been settled. You may even be happily married to this woman now, but the skeleton is there, rattling its bones in the closet.
Tech Companies Conduct Background Checks; What can I Do?
It comes down to this: if you have the ambition to build a career with a tech giant, you have to plan it early. This involves your choice of secondary school and college or university as well as any friendships and other personal relationships that you may foster there.
You should be careful with everything. Exercise caution and be kind to others. An excellent social image takes a lifetime to build and can easily crumble because of just one moment of folly. Watch your steps and be prudent before applying for your dream tech job and even more so after you get hired. Why is this important? Some tech companies run background checks on their employees on a regular basis.