Got a call this morning from someone who graduated from NIU 18 years ago. In 1991, he was charged with a drug crime and the paper reported on it. He says he paid the penalty and a judge later expunged the record.
But now he’s looking for a job and is concerned that this will pop up in a background check and eliminate him contention. So, he asked if his name could be removed from our archives. I googled his name and, sure enough, there’s the 1991 Northern Star story on the first page of results.
If he provided proof of the court disposition, we could go back into the archives and add a footnote that his record has been expunged. But that's only part of his problem, because the google search will still bring up his name next to a drug crime ... and that might be enough to eliminate him from a pool of job applicants.
This is coming up more and more often. How are others responding to these kinds of requests?
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I dealt with a similar call at about this time last year. At the time, our archives weren't accessible for editing, so that made for an easy (to say, not to explain) explanation before getting into all of the documentation.
Maybe someone with more hiring experience can give their opinion, but with as many applicants as companies receive (and with so many standard application forms that request arrest/conviction information), is this really a problem for many job applicants? Or just a fear when the callbacks don't come? Wouldn't the Google-ing come after a first interview?
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