By Mark Miclette

There are multiple ways background checks can be useful beyond just screening employees or for criminal checks. Here are some practical examples everyday folks can benefit from:

Checking Out New Friends

Meeting new contacts and friends happens all the time, especially when a person enters a new geographic location or working environment. However, that doesn’t mean that everyone a person meets is always the best person to be connected with, much less share personal information with. New contacts, acquaintances and friends can be discretely reviewed with background checks, causing no harm but providing a proactive protection to a person new to an area.

Knowing Who You Live Next To

Neighbors live right next to people and interact with them almost every day. However, most people have no idea about their neighbors’ backgrounds, where they come from, or who they are. Our modern age has lost a bit of the small town feel where everyone knows everyone to some extent. However, a background check can help make up for some of that loss, helping a person better understand who’s living next door.

Online Friends

While social media is designed to help people share, folks often have no clue who 99 percent of their online social media “friends” really are. Worse, those “friends” are sharing access to a lot of personal information about a person, including location, family details, work, education and more. Instead of just trusting blindly on the Internet, a good, discrete background check can identify a risk before the friend becomes an online problem.

New Relationships

Finding a new person to be romantically involved with is a great thing, but like new friends, new relationships often come with baggage that doesn’t get discovered until much later. Most people adapt, but sometimes there are details folks wish they knew ahead of time before ending up in a risky, personal situation. Again, a background check could discover some issues early on so a person is going into a relationship with eyes wide open.