A background check shows the records a screening company can legally retrieve about you and report to an employer. In practice that means criminal records, identity confirmation, and — if the employer ordered them — employment and education verification, plus driving or credit history for specific roles. It does not show your social media opinions, your medical history, or anything the screening firm cannot document.
What typically appears on the report
- Identity verification — legal name, aliases, date of birth, and address history drawn from credit-header and public records.
- Criminal records — county courthouse searches where you have lived, worked, or been arrested, plus state and federal repositories where the employer ordered them.
- Sex offender registry matches, where required or ordered.
- Employment verification — job titles, employers, and dates, confirmed with the company or a verification service.
- Education verification — degrees, institutions, and graduation dates confirmed with the registrar.
- Professional licences — status and standing confirmed with the issuing board.
- Driving records — for roles that involve driving, pulled from the state motor vehicle agency.
- Credit history — only for roles with fiduciary responsibility, and only in states that permit it.
What does not appear
Your race, religion, national origin, disability status, and — under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act — arrests that never led to conviction after seven years, bankruptcies older than ten years, and most other adverse items beyond the seven-year reporting window. Medical information is separately protected and is not part of a standard report.
How far back it looks
Most items are reportable for seven years. Convictions can be reported indefinitely in some states. A handful of states (California, Massachusetts, Montana, Washington, and others) impose tighter limits, so the same employer can receive different reports depending on where you live.
Why two candidates get different reports
Reports are scoped to the role. A warehouse role gets identity, criminal, and employment verification. A finance role adds credit. A delivery role adds driving. A clinical role adds licence and sanction checks. So "what a background check shows" is really "what this employer ordered for this job."
Your rights
The employer must give you notice before the check, get your written authorisation, and — if anything adverse comes back — send you a pre-adverse action copy of the report plus a summary of your FCRA rights. You then get a reasonable window to dispute errors before any final decision. Disputes go to the screening company, not the employer, and they must reinvestigate.
The practical takeaway
Read the report before you explain it. Errors are common — mismatched records, wrong dates, a common name attached to someone else's case — and the pre-adverse window is the moment to fix them. If you are the employer, order only what the role justifies, keep the scope documented, and give candidates the full dispute window.
Where this fits in a hiring process
If you are the one running these checks at volume, the hard part is applying the same standard to every candidate rather than the search itself — AI candidate evaluation covers how to structure that step.