CheckPlease Blog

By now you may be aware that on May 3, the Ministry of Justice is shutting down their free third party criminal record check service. If your organisation does lots of criminal record checks, this may be quite a big deal for you, as third party checks from the MoJ will now cost $11 each. If you do hundreds or thousands of free checks a year, that's many thousands of dollars per year that you'll need to find. Even if you currently use the cheapest available priority service - the bronze 15 day check at $8.50 - you're still going to end up in the red. When money is tight, it can be tempting to look for short cuts. So what are your options? What about switching to self-checks? One tempting idea might be to get the candidate to do their own check, and then email you the result. In the past this wasn't a very tempting option, as self checks were slow, just like free third party checks. There was no advantage in trying to use self-checks over third party checks - both were fr

This May 3 sees the biggest changes to the NZ criminal record checking system in many years. Today I'd like to cover what to me is the most surprising of these changes and one that will affect many employers.  All checks are now fast, taking just 3 working days. Yes, you read that right - all self-checks and third party checks now take 3 days. The MoJ have done away with all priorities, including the standard 20 working day turnaround for free checks, and the 3, 10 and 15 day turnarounds for CCH (priority) checks. Effectively all checks are now gold. This dramatic speedup will have many NZ organisations rethinking their recruitment processes. Many companies today are used to dealing with slow results, and so they'll start new employees long before they have their criminal record. The company will typically protect themselves by asking the candidate about their criminal record on their application form. The new employee then commences their new job with a clause like "we ca

  This May 3 sees the biggest changes to the NZ criminal record checking system in many years. As well as introducing a new online portal, the Ministry has made a number of changes to its business model. I'd like to share my thoughts on the impact of all of this on your background checking processes. Without further ado, let's look at change #1, and it's a big one. The MoJ's free third party service has reached the end of the road. From May 3, there is no longer any safe way to get a candidate's criminal record without paying . For many organisations doing high volumes of free checks, this is a big deal. Currently, you and your candidate can complete the standard third party form , which you then post to the Ministry. After 20 working days or so, you would get back the candidate's report. All free. Obviously there were several problems with this model. For one, 20 working days is a long time. To deal with this, many companies today add the "we can terminate

We've had a lot of feedback from customers wanting to share their CheckPlease account with co-workers. So we're pleased to announce that as of today, CheckPlease is freely multi-user - so you and your co-workers can all work together in a single CheckPlease account. There are no per-user charges, so you can add as many users as you need for your business. To invite co-workers to your account, click to the "Users" menu and invite someone by entering their email. As soon as they click through and join, you'll see their name appear in the users tab. Your new user is up and running and can start ordering their own checks! Along with multiple users comes the need for a more powerful security model, so we've added three different user types: users, admin and primary admin. Having multiple users is useful when: you have a large organisation, with several different people all performing checks you want redundancy, e.g. so when someone goes on

Kudos to  Aotal for hosting a top notch HR community event last week, benefitting CureKids. There were plenty of highly engaged HR people talking to a wide range of vendors, from established players like SilkRoad to early stage startups like CheckMate . As the first company to provide truly paperless Criminal Record checks in New Zealand, we had a great opportunity to preview another of our firsts: branded checks. Branded checks take the candidate pre-employment experience to the next level. Employers are increasingly trying to smooth out this gnarliest of parts of the recruiting process. Getting real feedback from real customers - that's a privilege at any event! My personal highlight of the event - corporate anthropologist Michael Henderson's insightful graphs.

When it comes to candidate criminal record checks, you're dealing with the ultimate in sensitive personal data, so your recruitment process has to be squeaky clean. Here are 3 areas to watch out for. 1. If you're hiring people conditionally, keep all of your paperwork straight - not just your application form In 2013, Fonterra was forced to pay $18,000 compensation to Jason Richardson, a driver who was sacked after he failed to disclose his traffic and criminal convictions on Fonterra's job application form. Fonterra's application form at the time was crystal clear regarding convictions. It asked applicants to disclose any criminal or driving convictions. It also dealt with cases where background check results were not confirmed until after employment had started, by stating that misleading or false information could be grounds for dismissal without notice. However when applying, Richardson mistakenly assumed that his previous convictions fell under the Cle