Community association staff members are part of residents’ lives. Not only are they vibrant members of the community, they also often have access to units, mail, and personal information of people who live in the building. It’s crucial, then, that the individuals hired by a community association be reliable, trustworthy, and dependable, in addition to being adequately trained to handle sensitive information and personal property.

In hiring staff, managers have a duty to provide their buildings with the best people for the job. In this day and age, that duty involves going through a thorough and rigorous screening process to weed out candidates with records of terminations, disciplinary action, or criminal history. It also means finding the best candidates for the job, using time-honored techniques to place the optimal applicant.

Let’s take a look at how—and why—the best employers screen their applicants.

Avoid Snap Judgments

It is human nature to trust our base instincts. We all feel like we’re pretty good judges of character. We all think we are able to differentiate, on some intuitive, gut level, the people of quality from those of shadier dispositions.

The truth, however, is that we’re not. Even those who are particularly good at judging character fall short sometimes. It’s one thing when you’re trying to pick a lab partner for eighth grade chemistry class. But when these snap judgments form the basis for a hiring decision, the stakes become much higher. Money, big money, is at stake. And sometimes more.

Les Rosen opens The Safe Hiring Manual: The Complete Guide to Keeping Criminals, Imposters and Terrorists Out of Your Workplace, his indispensable guidebook on how to screen applicants, with a cautionary tale: a carpet company in California, desperate for labor, hired employees indiscriminately, not bothering with any sort of background checks. Workers went right from the interview to the homes of the company’s clients. One of them wound up killing someone.

“If the employer had just taken two minutes to pick up the phone and call the supposed past employment references, then the employer would have immediately discovered the applicant’s claims…were fraudulent,” Rosen says. “Just a two-minute phone call or a simple record check would have saved a life.”

This is an extreme example, of course. But Rosen’s point is clear: the decision to hire Applicant A over Applicant B can have dire consequences, if not done properly.

“Once a worker is hired, this person literally has keys to your economic house,” he writes. “This person now has access to your assets, your clients, your co-workers, your money, your reputation, and even your very existence. If you make a bad hiring decision, the results can be devastating. The root of the problem is that one of the most utilized hiring tools in America is simply the use of gut instinct.”

Gut instinct has its place. But it must—must—be reinforced with cold, hard facts.

Step by Step

Barry Nadell is one of the nation’s leading experts on the subject of background screening. His former company, Nadell Investigations, specializes in background checks. Since retiring a few years ago, Nadell is frequently called as an expert witness in these sorts of cases.

Let’s say you have an opening in your condo for a doorman. You find someone who seems perfect. What’s the next step?

First, you want to do some basic background checking yourself. Check those references. Confirm dates of employment—and don’t let it affect your decision if a company is tight-lipped about giving you more than dates of employment; HR departments now train their staff and managers not to reveal more than this as a matter of course, to avoid lawsuits. If it’s relevant, check out the person’s education, too. If all that holds up, it’s time to bring in the big guns.

“The most commonly used method” for background checks, Nadell says, “is for employers to hire a professional screening company and have them search for information. A basic package usually covers where they’ve lived in the past, a Social Security report, to certify previous residences; a motor vehicles report, not to see accidents and tickets, but DUIs. It further helps ID the person.”

“Besides going to the courts, they should do a database search,” Nadell adds, which will show crimes committed in counties that are not their county of residence, as well as sex offender status.

A shortcut some employers take, he cautions, is only doing a database report and not going to the courthouse to search records. To get the full picture of an applicant, it’s necessary to do both, as key information sometimes doesn’t come up on database reports.

“Ask if they’ve ever been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor, or have spent time in prison. Don’t just ask for felonies—in some states, misdemeanors can be just as bad.” If they lie during the interview, Nadell says, “It’s easy to terminate for that.”

The Whole Story

“Unless a firm engages in due diligence in hiring,” Rosen asserts, “it is a statistical certainty that the firm will eventually hire someone with a criminal record.”

While this is true, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Not all felonies and misdemeanors are equal, and not all of them are relevant to the job in question. For example, it is not unusual for journalists to spend time in jail, if they are covering protests or riots. To eliminate applicants out of hand because of a criminal record that can be explained away in two minutes is unfair to the applicant—and it deprives the hiring manager of a potentially great employee.

To this end, the Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) board in the state of Massachusetts changed a long-held policy last year. “Governor (Deval) Patrick implemented new rules and regulations for CORI law,” explains Doug Troyer, a partner with Marcus, Errico, Emmer & Brooks, in Braintree, Massachusetts. “Before, you could ask an applicant if they’ve been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor.”

Now that has changed; although you can bring it up—and should—during the interview, it’s unlawful to solicit that information on an application. The reasoning, Troyer explains, is to open up the applicant pool, and to give those who have valid explanations for their past misdeeds a change to speak, and get hired.

Not that you’re under any obligation to hire felons. “Unfortunately, the recidivism rate in this country is quite high,” Nadell says. “If someone has been convicted of theft, you probably don’t want to give them the keys to the register.”

At a condo or HOA, the stakes are even higher. “They might have access to people’s homes,” he says. “You don’t want sex offenders, or someone convicted of battery. Even spousal abuse is a violent crime.”

You are legally permitted to ask about criminal records during an interview, but there are plenty of topics that remain off limits.

“You can’t ask about disabilities. You can’t ask if they’re married. You can’t ask about their age. You can’t get into religion. Anything that could potentially be looked upon as discriminatory, you want to avoid,” Troyer advises.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that regulates these matters, has specific guidelines on what not to ask.

In general, though, those kinds of questions don’t give great insight into an applicant; the best way to frame questions during an interview is not to ask yes-or-no queries about a person’s social life, but open-ended questions that reveal the way in which they reason and solve problems.

Signs of the Times

Hiring a company to perform a background check may seem like a prohibitive expense to a board looking to cut costs. Not so. A common misconception, Nadell says, is that background checks are expensive. For as little as $25, he says, you can get good information.

Compared with the expense of firing an employee, doing a simple background check costs peanuts.

Sometimes, just making applicants aware of the fact that they will be screened is enough to send them scurrying away, like birds from a scarecrow. At his company offices, Nadell would post a sign that reads, “We protect our employees and customers by background screening all applicants.”

“It’s a deterrent,” he says. “Some people would read the sign, turn around, and leave. It’s a simple thing as posting a sign.”

If only that carpet company in California had hung the same sign.

Greg Olear is a freelance writer and a frequent contributor to New England Condominium.