Have you heard of Protect My Ministry’s Service Alerts feature?
It’s a powerful new tool you can add-on to your screening process, to uncover potential gaps in address and criminal reporting and ensure you’re able to make the most informed decisions possible for your organization’s safety.
Filling in the Gaps
As you may know, even the most thorough screening can come up against gaps in reportable information. In the U.S., the only crimes that are required by law to be reported at a national level are sex offenders. Beyond that, each state has autonomy to determine if they will push felonies and misdemeanors up to the national level; collect and hold them at a statewide level; or leave the information to reside at the county level.
So while you will always receive registered sex offender information for all 50 states and all criminal information that is reported, you may encounter applicants from states that do not chose to push criminal information to the national level – and that’s where a Service Alert can take effect and spark a more detailed investigation.
A Straightforward Solution
Here’s how it works: When a potential problematic address is uncovered, a Service Alert “pauses” the order in the background check request so that our team of criminal researchers can manually review the applicant’s address history and determine if they have lived in an area where there are gaps in the criminal reporting.
Then, according to a rule you establish based on your budget and parameters, we will add supplemental searches based on whatever time frame you choose – most organizations go back seven years.
Tailored to Your Needs and Budget
Here are examples of how you can tailor Service Alerts to hit your investigative and cost targets:
- You can authorize Protect My Ministry to review seven years of address history, adding county/statewide searches as needed, with no cost limit – this would result in the most thorough screening for each applicant.
- You can set a cost parameter – for example, requesting a seven-years search of address history, adding county/statewide searches as needed not to exceed a specific, pre-set dollar amount of additional costs to your standard order. This increases the scope of your screening while keeping your costs more predictable.
- Or you can place a specific limit on the scope of your Service Alert – for example, adding one county or state search when the address history includes locations outside of your standard package recommendations.
We’ve created this feature to offer you peace-of-mind by closing any unexpected gaps in the background screening process, while also giving you control over the process and budget. We think Service Alerts strike the ideal balance between cost-effectiveness and comprehensiveness, since you are only charged for specific requests that need the additional jurisdictions searched.
Want to learn more about Service Alerts? Ready to add one to your screening? Reach out to a Protect My Ministry sales consultant at sales@protectmyministry.com for more information.