Business Services

Criminal Record Search – Get All the Info You Can

As a company, it’s always a liability to hire on employees who have criminal background histories. Although they may have served time in jail or prison to give retribution to society for their wrongs, many times previous criminal histories may mean criminal activity in the future. Depending on the line of work you’re in, this could spell disaster for your business or place of employment. As an employer, you should take whatever measures necessary, including a criminal record search, to ensure that you hire reputable and trustworthy employees.

Although background searches used to be very expensive and were only reserved for police and military personnel, now the general public has access to the same resource. The costs are still quite high compared to just taking your chances with an employee, but many employers who take the quality of their employees seriously will run criminal searches on their potential employees to make sure that they don’t have a past they’re trying to hide.

Online services like Tenant Screening Services, LLC offer comprehensive employee criminal check services that will allow employers to check the validity and quality of an employee they’re considering hiring. As said earlier, although these checks can be expensive, they’re well worth the investment if you can ensure that your employee pool is of the highest quality. Preemployment screening can be done relatively quickly and doing it online ensures you don’t even have to leave your desk to do, unlike in years gone by where you’d have to take forms to the local police station to have a background check done.

Social Media Marketing

A Note on Digital Sharecropping

By definition, digital sharecropping is “One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.”

The term derived from farming practices after the American Civil War, and not very different from feudalism, where a landholder would permit farmers to grow crops on their land and would enjoy most of the profits generated by the crops. Simply put, the landholder has all of the control and could put a farmer out of work if he wanted to.

While we’ve moved on from such times, the truth is that this practice remains prevalent. Take Facebook and Google+, for example. The more content you create for them, the more valuable they become.

Since most businesses are dependent on Facebook to thrive and have set up their business online for free, it’s important that you have to stay in the ‘good books’ of Facebook or you can find yourself out in the cold.

This is, for all practical purposes, sharecropping in its digital form. Without a doubt, there are certain disadvantages that come in taking such an approach.

Firstly, the ‘landlord’ might remain in demand forever or gone tomorrow and all those hours that you’ve put into your fledgling online business will be for nought.

Secondly, there’s every chance that you can violate the terms of service or Facebook can change the way you relate to customers. What will your business do then?

This is why it is always recommended to have a well-designed website with your own web hosting provider, an opt-in email list and a reputation that offers value who stays or goes.

In short, this is best way to build your business by buying your own land instead of renting it.

Internet Marketing

Bad Yelp Review Leads to $750,000 Lawsuit

Guest post Provided by Yelp Mediation

A negative Yelp review has had extraordinarily expensive consequences for two people in Virginia. Though high school sweethearts they were not, two former teenage classmates from Virginia grew up to have a very public falling out on Yelp (and other review sites). This November, Christopher Dietz sued Jane Perez, his former classmate, for Internet defamation. In a scathing Yelp review, Perez not only claimed that Dietz’s work had been subpar, but that he had stolen jewelry from her home. Through his suit, Dietz is seeking $750,000 in damages. Ouch!

Perez hired Dietz’s company to carry out cosmetic repairs on her home in Fairfax, Virginia. The story, as told in The Washington Post, is that Perez did not pay for those services, which prompted an earlier suit by Dietz against Perez. The $750,000 suit, however, is on account of the negative publicity Perez created for Dietz on multiple business review sites found online. Reputation management was clearly in order, and Dietz went to the courts.

As a result of his legal filing, Dietz got a judge to order that Perez take down the most damning words in her reviews. Bad reviews are nothing new to businesses, and the media is pointing to the Dietz vs. Perez case as a cautionary tale about all the wrong that can ensue from untrue online reviews.