What is a prospective employer looking for in a background check? The specific item I'm concerned about is a bankruptcy. I have no enforcement actions, brushes with the law, or the like, and my resume/logbook are honest. Any thoughts?

Some do credit checks, not all. Usual criminal background, social media, hard data on your application like college record, prior employment, license actions.

GF

Basically major airlines are terrified of hiring two kinds of people...

Those with serious undisclosed background issues (DUI, criminal, employment problems, training problems). These are the worst, because they have skeletons and, more importantly, lie about them.

People with significant personality deviations, including borderline mental health problems.

Any background glitch will be considered in light of how it reflects on the character/stability of the individual, and their honesty. The obvious take-away... honesty goes a long way, that and enough time will overcome most black marks.

A major would like to acquire ALL possible information about you, limited only by cost. They are practically limited by state labor laws, which typically limit what info they can acquire, how they acquire it, and how they can use it... this is important, if they don't ask about it, don't tell them. They may be legally prevented from asking, but if you tell them they will likely consider the info, at least informally. An interview is not confessional. Don't lie, and do err on the conservative side if you're not sure about what they're asking but don't offer detrimental info which they didn't ask for.

That said I think some majors (based on their HQ state law) may be able to check your credit/civil court history, while others may not.

A recent BK is probably not going to reflect well on you if they have that info. They are looking for inherently responsible people. There may have been mitigating circumstances, but everyone will have an excuse and they don't have the resources to try to validate your excuse so they'll typically move on to someone else. Your best help here is the passage of time, if you were young and it was ten years or more in the past I would think it would have minimal impact. Again some employers may not even be able to consider credit history in hiring.


Regionals with hire anyone with 1475 hours and a medical cert. They don't want to know about your background... wink, wink, plausible deniability. Except you need to meet federal SIDA requirements and no DUIs within five years (for canada ops, which applies to most regionals).

They look at your social media profiles? How do they do that and what are they looking for?

They look at any of the common social medias, including the big pilot forums.

Whether they can see anything depends on whether your accounts are locked down (ie access only to friends/family), and how anonymous your forum accounts are.

If your name is john doe, your email account on airlineapps is john.doe@ google.com and your APC user ID is johndoe, then they are going to read every post you ever made on APC (jetcrareers, flightinfo, baseops, etc). Or at least enough posts to get a flavor for your temperament.

What they are looking for on social media is any outrageous posting or pics. Anything that reflects poorly on your temperament, or any pics which they would not want in the media after an accident. You holding a beer at a family BBQ, maybe OK. Frat-boy hijinks involving beer bongs, probably not good. Edgy politics or activism, maybe not good. ANY reference to drugs, or ANY images involving drugs or paraphernalia... game over. All of this applies to stuff posted by other people, even without your knowledge.

This applies to majors, not regionals, although regionals with AA flow presumably use major airline standards.

They just have to put your name in a Facebook search and see what they get.

GF

Sure, but in the case of Facebook, most people don't make their posts public. If someone did a search for me, they would find me and a picture, but that's all. They would have to friend me to see anything else. Not that I'm too concerned... I do discuss politics now and the discussions are civil. Still, I've heard some employers require you to friend them, which I think is preposterous and crosses the line.

You're going to see more and more of this as it is now assumed that your social life exists primarily online. Twenty years ago, airline recruiters couldn't invite themselves over to your house on saturday night to hang out with you and your buds drinking beer, but now they can since there's no law against it.

It isn't illegal yet, though I hear this is being contested in various states such as Oregon. You could also employ the Socratic method of response by inquiring back, "would you grant me access to all of your family photos, a timeline of your activities with your spouse, significant others, family and friends, and your personal emails?" There are so many ways a savvy person could stay ahead of them. Granted, a major airline wants to know they aren't hiring creeps, but this method of hovering is creepy in itself, imo. What happens if one of your "friends" decides to post something like a distasteful political meme, or a picture of herself in a pot leaf T-shirt? "Friends" tend to clutter up people's accounts, even though you might not really be friends. Would I want to go through my entire friend list and either unfollow or unfriend any person who may potentially post something bad?

Oh I totally agree with you. But as long as it's legal, the socratic method isn't going to work out for you, you'll have to co-operate to graduate.

I think there should be legal protections, and suspect there will be. But it will probably be at the state level, and thus inconsistent.

There are absolutely no constitutional protections which could be applied cart-blanche nation-wide to this situation. Just another example of tech getting out-pacing the legal system.

Current advice being given is to clean up social media if you want a legacy job, and that includes unfriending people as needed. You would *think* that employers snooping in social media would be looking mostly at you, and only considering your "friends" in aggregate so that one idiot's post doesn't ruin your career, but I'm hearing otherwise.

I've been told that having a bunch of ganga-oriented hippys as friends will get your job offer revoked. Same for edgy motorcycle enthusiasts.