The Easter Bunny and the $70,000 background check

All the nasty news about Rutgers University's Athletic Department has been hard to miss of late, and rightly so.  First, there was the disciplinary action and eventual termination of Basketball Head Coach Mike Rice for some very immoral and inappropriate conduct toward his players.  Athletic Director Tim Pernetti footed the remainder of the blame and was out shortly after Rice.  The next bit of turmoil and publicity arose when it came to light that Rice's replacement was touted in the university's press release as being a graduate of Rutgers (he attended but did not graduate), an occurrence that would seem to reflect some disjointedness on the part of the university.  Five weeks after Pernetti's resignation, Rutgers brought on Julie Hermann, an accomplished candidate who offers a glut of coaching and athletic administration experience with other top-tier universities.  Well, as it turns out, Julie has quite a past of her own, with a series of legal settlements founded upon accusations that rival the deplorable actions of none other than Mike Rice. 

This could easily be an entry pecking at the unfortunate and avoidable events that have transpired at Rutgers over the past several months.  I can certainly voice an informed opinion on these matters, as I'm: a) a Human Resources professional; b) an annual donor to the university; and c) a great fan and longtime season-ticket-holding follower of the Rutgers Football program.  This could easily be an opinion piece arguing that Tim Pernetti took swift action and did more due diligence than he gets credit for, being that he orchestrated a process which sought out and utilized formal involvement from the university's President, its HR professionals, and a host of internal and external counsel.  Or this could be an entry about Julie Hermann and the host of wildly alarming accusations and settlements attached to her name. 

 

No, this is really mainly about background checks.  It has been widely reported this week that When asked how it came to be that many of the reported incidents from Julie Hermann's storied past that have recently come to light did not get discovered or scrutinized during Rutgers' hiring process, university officials, in support of their process, stated that the background checking that was done on Julie Hermann was so thorough that it cost $70,000. 

A $70,000 background check?

I've very thoroughly and very recently shopped background checking vendors, and I can report that a background check — even an excruciatingly detailed and time-consuming one, virtually never costs more than $300 and more typically costs less than $200.  So a $70k background check is rather hard to fathom.

he $70k that the university spent was more likely spent on the recruiting effort; the university likely paid $70k to a third-party recruiter, and perhaps as part of the service provided, that recruiting agent held responsibility for conducting or initiating background screening.  

In a scenario whereby a third-party recruiter is tasked with background checking, it's reasonable to assume that the recruiter might have a stronger interest in placing a candidate than in scouring to find reasons not to place the candidate.  After all, the monetary incentive does not pay out if the hire is not made; further, a recruiting agent generally wants to please hiring managers by delivering quality candidates quickly.  By doing otherwise, the recruiter runs the risk of losing out on the contract entirely.  That's not to say this is a challenge solely inherent to third-party recruiters, nor is it to say that recruiters tend to act unethically more often than not.

But even a background check would not necessarily show the types of occurrences that have now come up post-hire as black marks for Julie Hermann.  The offenses we're reading about in the news media would not typically yield any criminal arrests, nor any convictions, motor vehicle offenses, or sex offender list entries.  If, however, Hermann had lied about her college degree or dates of employment, or if she used a false social security number or had bad credit, she would have been caught.  Without a doubt.

No, background checking does not tell the tale of one's character, and theoretically, the only way Rutgers would know about Julie's past incidents would be via conducting uncommonly thorough reference checking.  Reference checking is widely regarded in the corporate world as a low-value process.  A prospective employer asks the applicant to provide the names of two to four references, and maybe one or all must be professional references.  The applicant chooses folks who will sing loud praise in their favor, and HR or a third-party vendor contacts those references.  After some proper chasing, and after several references are collected (complicated further in that many companies forbid employees from providing references), the offer is made.  This is the reality of traditional reference checking; it is time-consuming and tedious, and, mainly because the sources of information are scant and selected by the applicant, the resulting information is virtually never negative.  In my ten years of HR experience, I've literally never received one bad reference.

In recent years, some organizations have gone all-in and implemented incredibly thorough reference checking with the assistance of sophisticated third-party coordination tools like Checkster.  This sort of practice is not suited for every organization or every job.  Realistically, though, this is the sort of thing Rutgers, with its highly visible, highly scrutinized Athletic Department, needed to do.  In this new-style reference checking, the hiring organization demands a thorough cross-section of references from folks who have worked with the candidate — perhaps 25 to 50 references altogether, and all sign non-disclosure agreements.  In the example of a former coach and Assistant Athletic Director like Julie Hermann, the process would ideally involve a wide variety of players, coaches and administrators from each of her prior employers.  Needless to say, this adds exponential complexity and time to the hiring process, and the risk of her current employer finding out she is interviewing is heightened.  But if executed correctly, the end result of this disciplined process is a valuable and extensive compilation of information that serves to support good hiring decisions and raise flags at questionable ones.  Given that Rutgers stuck to its guns and decided against the bold and unlikely course of doubling back to initiate reconciliation with Tim Pernetti, the university should have amassed as much supporting evidence as possible about the character and background of candidate Julie Hermann, as the scrutiny that transpired was foreseeable given the recent Athletic Department hiring history.  Rutgers is a world-class university, and this process deserved diligence to the utmost extent, if for nothing else, to disprove the inevitable naysayers.

Note that the $300 figure referenced above includes thorough reference checking — but if you or someone you know ever needs a $70,000 background/reference check, please don't hesitate to call me.