You have questions? We have answers. First in a multi-part series.
How many parts? We aren’t sure yet. There’s a lot of ground to cover.
Why can criminal searches take so long? (Part I)
A lot of things can impact how fast or slow a criminal search takes. Let’s focus on the things outside of the court’s scope and focus on the processes of your screener.
- Quality assurance processes. Quality assurance is a good thing—no one ever wants to get reporting a criminal record wrong.
I hear from people (who are now customers) that searches in relatively easy jurisdictions were taking weeks or close to months. This bears looking into.
Are your applicants with “clear” records coming back relatively quickly, and folks who have records take much longer? It’s usually a bottleneck in quality assurance. Processors can clear applicants with no record, but if a possible record appears, it goes up the chain of command. There may be 20+ processors and one person to QA all those hits. It will cause delays.
- Class A customers vs. everyone else. Money talks. And I was surprised to hear it from my source in the industry who has been there and done that. If your biggest customer drops 12,000 searches in Middlesex County, Massachusetts it may be all hands-on deck, and everyone else waits. And everyone else may be you.
- And this makes no sense to me: I spoke with a prospective client this week who said that her current provider said some jurisdictions are really hard to search. That is true, some jurisdictions are really hard to search. Sacramento County, California comes to mind first.
However, the county she named is probably one of the easiest, fastest searches in the nation. And I’m not wrong. After 29+ years of searching this jurisdiction, all I could do is shake my head.
What sets us apart?
- Every processor at Cutting Edge Background is certified in the Fair Credit Reporting Act by the PBSA. Quality assurance is everyone’s job, not just a chosen few.
- Truth be told, all our clients are Class A. We work on a strict, first-in first-out basis.
- I don’t know what to say about #3. Some courts are hard searches, but I disagree with apparently covering up a lack of customer service or plain laziness by telling a customer a jurisdiction is hard to search, without backing it up with why that jurisdiction is hard to search.
