Generally, the blog is for factual information but I felt I had to share this story. This was a phone call we received from a prospective client who had questions about our services and what we did.

It seems that this gentleman ran a company that was rather small. He had less than 20 employees. He did not do formal background checks on any of his employees. Most of them were hired by his company because they were recommended by someone he knew. To make a long story short – he called because for the third time that day a police officer had just left his building. This was at 11am so obviously he was having a long day. It seems that one of his employees took offense to the Christmas Party he had for his staff. He took them all out, bought them dinner and drinks and they had a great time a couple of weekends before. The owner did not realize one of his employees practiced a different religion and would take offense to this, even though that employee went along and took the free meal and the free drinks and never voiced any objection. So, he was being served with papers indicating that he would need to answer to a civil suit for discrimination.

Shortly after that he was again visited by the local law enforcement. He was being sued by a temporary employee that he had brought in to his firm to act short term in place of one of his people who was on an extended leave. That temporary employee was involved in a conversation with one of his sales people who called in from out of state. The temporary employee was suing him because she advised that she was sexually harassed by the sales person and the owner had provided an unsafe working environment. The owner had been notified previously of the allegations and, reacting to what he had found out when he looked in to the complaint, he had terminated the sales man. However, the temporary employee did still sue him.

About this time, I don’t know about you, but I would have a headache!

The third and final visit that he received from a police officer that morning was the one that delivered the documents that indicated he was being sued by the sales man he fired. He was being sued for wrongful termination.

While I felt very sorry for this individual, I couldn’t help wondering why he wouldn’t have done background checks on any of these people. He did end up hiring a private investigator who found that the temporary who sued him had a history of this, and the sales man had his own history. While a pre-employment background check would not have addressed any religious preference, his private investigator found that this person had a history of filing civil suits of this nature against former employers. Running a civil background check would have made him aware of the situation and the sensitivity of the issues he would be dealing with. Running a background check on any one of these three employees, and checking civil records, would have provided him some advance warning of potential problems for all of these employees.

Probably the most unfortunate thing about this whole problem was that the owner of the company decided he didn’t need to worry about background checks on his people. His philosophy was that he had already been sued 3 times in one day, and what were the chances of this ever happening again. He was sure his string of “bad luck” had run its course. Believe it or not, this is a true story.

So, what do you think?