What can an employment background check entail?

Your employment history and education history should be pretty evident on your resume. Things you have to wrory about on a background check tend to be criminal history and increasingly your credit history. Other things I fear of being revealed: Transferring to a school for one semester and withdrawing from all my classes Unless your applying to gradschool (and not even really then, transferring and doing a complete exit are incredibly common), your future employer does not give a shit how you performed in your anthro 1002 class.

Thanks for your response, brainmouse, but I have read that background checks can include (and I apologize for not mentioning this in my initial post) information beyond criminal records, such as academic transcripts (with my permission, of course, but how could I ever say "No" to them?).

When I applied to Boeing a few years back, I was sent a copy of my background check, which had information going back since my freshman year of college. It had a criminal check, a credit check and a list of my prior residences and aliases (shorter form of my given name). It had my school history and GPA, but no employment history. Generally, prospective employers will ask for references from previous employment, if they want to hire you. These will be contacts from your prior job(s). It's highly unlikely a prospective employer will care about the transfer or leave of absence — unless the interviewer asks and the issues are related in some way, I wouldn't even bring it up. It's almost certainly not going to be in your background check report, in any case.

They're really only concerned about things like felony convictions. And right now, blocks of time where you've been unemployed are not at all uncommon, especially if you were in school for part of that time. The overwhelming majority of employers could not care less about what you were doing in college unless what you were doing involved committing crimes. Don't worry about it.

Since you mentioned employment history, most HR departments will make at least a half-assed effort to confirm that you were employed at the places you say you were during the times you said.

They probably won't care about your school history, as long as you came out in relatively decent shape. Employment background check, as you call it, consists of you listing your previous employment on a resume and/or application form and your prospective employer maybe bothering to actually verify that information, and also possibly asking your previous employer if you're a total jerk or anything. A criminal background check (which the term "background check" usually refers to) consists of you giving the prospective employer permission to ask the police if there's any reason you shouldn't get a certain sort of job (e.g. childcare). This is a yes or no question, and around here (Canada, YMMV) it will get a yes or no answer and nothing more. Yes, volunteer work counts as a job.

Keep in mind they don't usually run checks like this until after they've decided to offer you the job. In many cases they will offer you the job before, on the condition they don't find something awful. So it's not really part of the decision process, as far as "oh his grades weren't good enough, let's get the other guy." The only way it will really cost you is if you have a serious criminal conviction, OR if you get caught in a lie.

They can check for any of the things you asked about. There's no law that prevents them from calling your previous employers or your university and collecting whatever information those sources are willing to give out about you. Your university may be bound by privacy laws that prevent it from giving out information about you without your permission, but your potential employer may request that permission from you. My advice would be simply not to lie, ever, on any document you submit to them or in any conversation you have with them. Withdrawing from school for health reasons and being unemployed in the worst economy in decades are not shameful and they're not reasons that an employer would pass on a candidate they otherwise like. Lying, however, might make them change their minds about you. So be candid and forthright, and you'll most likely be fine.

I had a background check and fingerprinting done when I took a job at a school - even though I was in the administrative offices and never even saw a kid, legally, it had to be done. To echo what everyone else is saying: They are looking for felonies and (often) bankruptcies, that sort of thing. They are NOT looking at classes you dropped/flunked out of, leaves of absence, transferring to a different school or the like. I had a VERY checkered academic past and got the job anyway because my fingerprints cleared.