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By running the check only after making a job offer, Voca protects itself from charges of discrimination. The company has set unambiguous standards for the information background checks turn up, and it sticks to those standards. For instance, no one convicted of a felony and no one with a history of abuse, neglect, or mistreatment will be hired to work with clients. Finally, Voca keeps specific findings confidential to protect against defamation. If, at your company, one person handles both the background checks and the hiring, that individual must be careful to consider only job-related information when hiring.

To facilitate background checks, you should get complete information from applicants -- full name, social-security number, driver's license number, address, employment history with no unexplained gaps -- and ask them to sign a release giving you permission to confirm it all.

If you're too shorthanded to do extensive background checks internally, you can hire outside investigation firms, which can pry into every imaginable area of an applicant's past. Companies usually order extensive checks only for sensitive, high-level positions -- top managers or people who will handle large amounts of money. More common checks include those of the applicant's workers' compensation, credit, and criminal records. But even those checks raise legal questions.

Some companies want to know an applicant's history of workers' comp claims in order to detect malingerers. And although workers' comp records are not public, there may be legal ways for a private investigator to obtain that information. However, under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), you may not do a workers' comp check before offering someone a job.

As for credit and criminal checks, the government protects certain classes of citizens -- racial minorities and women, for instance -- against discrimination. Members of some protected classes are more likely to have bad credit or to have been convicted of a crime. If you consistently base hiring decisions on those criteria, you open yourself up to discrimination lawsuits. You would have to demonstrate that the information was related to the job, and in many cases that would be hard to prove. If you're hiring a driver, a drunken-driving arrest is relevant; if you're hiring a security guard, criminal history is relevant; if you're hiring a telemarketer, neither is.

Look into state laws, too, before conducting such checks. Many states don't allow you to check records of arrests, but most -- not all -- allow you to check convictions. Some states require you to get the applicant's approval before running checks, and some protect certain information. Speak to a labor lawyer before you do anything. And if you hire an outside firm to do your digging, demand a degree of legal savvy from it. Many display a cavalier attitude that could land you in court.

Drug Tests
Preplacement tests are administered after a company makes a job offer contingent upon a clean result. That may be the safest time, legally, to test for drugs, but some employers wonder if it's the least effective, since many applicants now expect a test.

Voca, for one, prefers to give preplacement drug tests. Its care givers must respond quickly in an emergency, so the company has good reason for ensuring they're clean. (After seven years of testing, it consistently finds that 4% of applicants test positive.)

Voca explains up front to all applicants that any job offer is conditional upon a clean drug test, and applicants sign a form indicating they've read and understood the policy. The company offers any applicant who tests positive an opportunity to retest at the company's expense. And Voca is consistent in its testing: it tests all candidates for care-giver positions. For accurate readings and to further protect itself, the company sends its tests to a certified laboratory. While that is more pricey, certification will help you if anyone challenges a test result in court.

Medical Exams
The ADA, which applies to companies with 25 or more employees (and beginning in July 1994, those with 15 or more), prohibits any pre-job-offer questions about medical conditions. You may ask only whether the applicant can perform the functions of the job. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has permitted certain agility tests, such as those used by police and fire departments, but the line between those and medical exams remains unclear. Would it be legal to ask applicants to read an eye chart? To perform a strength test? We won't know for certain until the ADA shakes out.

After you make an offer, you can, under federal law, require a complete head-to-toe physical and access to all medical records. However, you cannot legally use any information that is not job related, says Mark Rothstein, director of the Health Law and Policy Institute at the University of Houston. Eleven states explicitly limit exams to job-related information.

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