No. The Work Number gets the information from the companies in question directly. Those companies don’t want the hassle and potential legal trouble of dealing with these requests, so they outsource it. Nothing shady about it.
I meant to reply to this post sooner:
So, yes, you had to sign a form that specifically said you give permission for them to collect salary information from old employers? I wonder how many people won’t sign this? It seems like a harsh thing to ask of a potential employee. It must cost them many people.
Ten years back brings me into college days. There’s just no way I’d remember every job I had then. Certainly not the dates! I sat down and tried to count how many jobs I’ve had once. It’s several dozen at least.
I’ve been at “real” jobs for seven years now, so I’ll just have to hope that for those first three years they won’t get worked up if they find a descrepency with the dates or anything.
My credit is fine. I do have a couple of collections accounts, but they don’t lower your score much, and the bums didn’t deserve to be paid. A drug test isn’t a problem.
I checked my own criminal history a while back through mail with the state of MA. It came back with only one hit. It was some kind of driving offense. Driving to endanger, I think. Everything else from my sordid past is buried because I was a minor. It’s not a felony or anything, so I should be all set there. Usually driving offenses are excepted from the list you have to report. Otherwise they’d be full of speeding tickets and moving violations.
There’s just no way I’m going to know all the former manager names. Not a chance.
You’re assuming that I’d openly tell them that’s what I’m doing. That’s a bad assumption.
My mistake. AFAIK, the salary information isn’t provided via the resume but rather from the actual job application. I don’t know what the tollerance is for errors with the companies I screen for, but I would guess if you said you made $13/hr and the actual number was $12.75 you probably don’t have a problem. However, if you were actually making $8/hr I would assume that you wouldn’t get the job.
[side rant] Also, it is amazing how poor the reading comprehension is of many people. If the application says to list your highest level of completed education, list that. I for sure am not interested in every single course you took at community college before you decided to drop out. And FYI, don’t tell employers you were a manager if you were an assistant manager. [/sr]
I’m not sure if it applies to all government workers or just those at universities, but I know that at least in New York, all university workers, from janitors to professors, have their salary information publicy available. I know because my stepdad, a professor at a local state university, would always refuse to tell me how much meony he made. One of my friends mentioned that government employees salaries are public information (I guess because they are part of governmental budget expenditures) so I looked it up and found him on a list of every employee at the university and their annual salary. Was very surprised at this policy, and happy to foil my step dad.
In general, yes, you can find out some area of a Government workers salary is, due to the fact you pay their salaries. The information generally include only base pay no OT or bonuses.