Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

As a child growing up in the ’70s in Indianapolis, Lee Hill was shocked when he discovered his classmates were among the many involved in a notorious drug smuggling ring nicknamed the “Yogurt Connection,” an allusion to the ringleader’s Yogo franchise.

Ten years later, when those involved were convicted and sent to prison, Hill’s childhood memories of the gang became a motivating factor when he chose to start Advanced Productivity Systems, a company that offered background verification services.

“I’ve always had concerns about what happens to people who go down the wrong path,” Hill said. “It’s what’s always drawn me to background checks.”

Now as the CEO of BackgroundNow.com, Hill is once again drawing from his past experiences to help others by opening the company’s proprietary secrets and sources to the public.

He said the idea stemmed from a letter he sent on LinkedIn offering his connections advice about any personal or employment-related issues they were having with background checks.

A reporter from the Wall Street Journal received a copy of the letter and contacted Hill. She asked several questions about what companies should do when a criminal conviction surfaces on a background check. Hill said he then realized that his company could better-serve their clients by publicly sharing the information they utilize when searching for criminal convictions.

“There are a lot of concerns and fears about public and private records, identify theft, and credit report inaccuracies,” Hill said. “I noticed there aren’t a lot of resources for individuals seeking qualified answers.”

So Hill custom-built a search engine and began indexing sources that offered free online criminal, civil, and other types of records along with expert advice from the field. The site now indexes over 950,000 industry-related pages.

“There’s a growing transparency in government when it comes to criminal and civil records,” Hill said. “More courts are offering direct access to the records themselves. But this business is highly nuanced in part because there’s this long information chain about criminal history that trickles through the county, state, and federal level. Then a degredation of data takes place. How to fill in those gaps is part of the expertise that we can give. So we are a company that provides a service as opposed to just reports.”

According to Compete.com, traffic to BackgroundNow.com is up 166 percent from last month and 2010 percent from the same time last year.

Popularity: 35% [?]