If you are hiring new employees without screening their backgrounds for criminal convictions, you will end up getting burned. It's just a matter of time! Would you like to find out that new sales guy you hired is actually a pedophile or your new accountant was convicted of thief?

How would you like ending up in court explaining why you didn't screen an employee, who is now being accused of stealing money from your customer and you didn't know about your employee's long record of convictions for thief? What would you say when the judge asks if you did your due diligence on this employees' background?

Let face it, people lie on resumes all the time and no one is upfront about their criminal background. Spending the money to make your work environment safe and to perform your required due diligence on new employees, just makes common sense, especially with the new affordable pricing available!

In recent years more and more courthouses are allowing electronic searches of their criminal records. Of course, for an individual to search these criminal records is a daunting task.

Fortunately there is now an easy and affordable solution to this problem - online criminal background screening companies. It is now very quick and inexpensive to do a criminal background check on an individual. All you need is the employees or recruit's name and date of birth, which is easily obtained from their driver's license, and you can find out about their criminal background in a few minutes.

We reviewed many online background screening companies and we chose Direct Screening as the best criminal background screening website. Their website is easy to use, it is fast (takes less than 15 seconds), it generates nice reports, and it is cost affordable. Prices range from $4.95 to $39.95.

This only leaves one question: How good is Direct Screening at actually identifying employees or recruits who have criminal records so you can avoid hiring them?

This is an area where Direct Screening really shines! To generate a report, they search their proprietary database of over 300 million criminal records from all 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico and Guam. This database is generated from just about every possible public source you can imagine, from to State Department of Corrections, to National Security databases at Interpol, to state Sex Offender registries, and to local court houses from across the country. It's clear that Direct Screening spends a lot of time making sure they have up-to-date data from the various criminal justice systems.

But even better, Direct Screening is one of the few background screening companies that list on their website every source that they screen for criminal records. Don't be fooled by the companies that offer unlimited searches of their criminal databases for a one time fee. The quality of their criminal record databases is poor at best. This is why they don’t publish which criminal records they search. Keep in mind the old adage "You get what you pay for."

We give our highest rating to Direct Screening. They've taken something that is very important for businesses, but which often gets overlooked, and they've made it simple, effective, and affordable!