thanks I will do that! i just don’t want to miss anything. Since you are an employee, do you remember if any forms asked about convictions/arrests?
Well the good news is you won’t need to drink and drive if they send you out to St Charles, IL for training. They have a bar on campus!
That’s a bit of an exaggeration…
…sometimes I had to drive or take the Acela train to the client’s city.
Consulting in general tends to be a meat grinder. 99% of consultants aren’t doing high-end strategy or management consulting like they do at McKinsey, Bain or BCG. Many of them aren’t even implementing systems or solving major business problems or even learning a particular industry of service. They are just doing “staff augmentation” work where they are basically glorified temps doing whatever the company needs them to do to make a buck.
In retrospect, if you can’t get into one of the top consulting firms right out of college (not doing fucking computer shit), then you are better off picking some industry or service you want to be an expert in, and try again in ten years when you are at a place in your career where people seek you out.
Consultants are salesmen, not technicians. If you aren’t selling work, you are selling your time. And you only have 24 hours in a day of your time to sell.
I’ve been experiencing that for a number of years now. Shitty little companies run by morons that try to sell the “startup” vibe. What that really means is they try to maintain a juvenile post college mentality, get people all worked up over the “exciting time to be at the company”, and make you bill 70 hours a week doing shit work.
I just came back from training from the consulting firm I just joined. Basically dozens of speeches by practice leads that are all some variation of “duuuh…I’ve been here 15 years…we’re not sure why turnover is so high or all our projects go over budget.”
Only fill out what is asked, and do so honestly. It sounds like they never asked you to disclose convictions.
I’ve seen the following sort of questions:
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Have you ever been convicted of a felony? [Or sometimes, "Have you been convicted of a felony in the past x year?] - A DUI misdemeanor offender would answer “no” to this.
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Have you ever been convicted of a misdemeanor? [Or sometimes, "Have you been convicted of a misdemeanor in the past x years?] - A DUI misdemeanor offender should answer “yes” to this.
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Have you ever been arrested or charged with a crime? This is kind of snakey, because regardless of how your DUI case turned out (say you got a diversion program, or reduced it to reckless driving) you would technically have to admit to being arrested for DUI/DWI here even if you hadn’t been convicted of it.
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Have your driving privileges ever been suspended for any reason? This is rare, but I saw this on an application form once. It was a company that was heavily DOT regulated, the position I was looking at was not a driving position. However, I think because like 80% of their workforce are professional drivers of large vehicles their standardized form had this question.
I think you have a decent chance of a misdemeanor DUI escaping a background check, but it depends on who is running the check, what court system has your records, and what access the person running the check has to information. I will say that in general NCIC and AFIS will catch almost anyone ever convicted or even charged with a crime, but you are not going to be searched against those databases by private employers because they do not have access to them. This is why if you apply for a job as a police officer for example, they actually take your fingerprints. They’ll find if you’ve ever been arrested for anything, and certainly will find any convictions.
About the only way you get around that, is if something happens that shouldn’t. Here in Virginia local police departments regularly send batches of these criminal records and fingerprints to the State Police, who maintain our own State level information database and then also transmit everything to the Federal databases. However, it came out awhile back a few State Police offices had bad record keeping policies and actually lost some of the information sent to them by local police forces and thus the information was never entered into either the State level database or the Federal database. I think that’s a rare thing though.
But for private employers, I’d guess almost all of them use a private security firm to do background checks. What we’ve seen is evidence many of these firms “oversell” their services, and claim that they do things they do not do. For example a firm may claim they send investigators out to interview people, and even to local courthouses to retrieve court records. While I won’t smear an entire industry, it appears at least some not-insignificant number of security firms have decided to just lie and say they do this when they don’t, because it costs a lot less money that way. In fact several security firms that do background investigations for Federal agencies have been caught falsifying records of reference interviews.
Because state-by-state, some locations don’t have any good publicly accessible centralized database, the only way an employer or a security firm can truly know your background is to go to every location you’ve lived in and search the records there. For example if you’ve lived in two cities in two separate states and counties they’d need to send people to both cities. They would also need to look for records involving you in municipal, county, and state courts. Because in many States the public has no way to access municipal court records without actually going to the municipal court and requesting them.
No, not remarkable at all. I have no idea what Accenture does, but firms like McKinsey are basically the fallback employer for Harvard (and probably the other Ivies) grads who haven’t come up with anything else to do after graduation.
What does Accenture do? Manage the creation and delivery of large systems. They are the prime contractor for the Presto fare card in Ontario, for example. As soon as I heard that Accenture had been chosen, I knew that there would be problems.
thanks!
So the background check was done by HireRight and it is complete! They have given me a start date! Yet still no questions about the record.
Just thought i’d update!
Congratulations, and I hope the new job works out great!
Ugh. They should change their name to Accidenture.
They do seem to be remarkably adept at taking the credit and assigning the blame. When we parted ways, they were transitioning to a model of subcontracting out the bulk of the work, with their own people as management/team lead types. If the project went well, they said it was because of their superlative management skills. If it tanked, they would throw the subcontractors under the bus.
Congrats!
Congrats! Could you tell me what accenture/HireRight ask(s) past employers they call during the background check?
“Did the candidate ever have problems with eating brains?”
“Would you characterize them as being an ideal zombification candidate?”
"Did the candidate demonstrate a consistent, daily pulse?
This was from over a year ago, so he’s probably working for a different company now…
or on unemployment.
“Did you eat brains today? Did you try to eat brains today? Were you available to eat brains today?”