Background Check Overview

For the low, low price of $10, Sweetheart Checks allows a user to check anyone’s criminal background as long as they have that person’s full name along with either their middle initial or birthday. As long as you have that information, the subject will never know you ran a check, and you can see his or her arrests, judgments, and even sex offender status. In the case of a freelancer who has questions about a client, it would indeed be nice to know if they have a history of bouncing checks, fraud or other money related crimes. Or, if this client asks you to meet him alone in an unfamiliar place, wouldn’t it be handy to know if he has a history of assault or robbery?

Another related and probably even more relevant check of this nature is the credit check. Credit checks are slightly different. For one, you have to ask permission to perform a credit check and credit checks include asking a client for his or her social security number. But, if you decide to go this route, you can discover information about your client’s financial history, including bankruptcies, foreclosures, liens, or other financial nightmares that might indicate you are dealing with a scammer or someone who simply has trouble getting financial affairs in order (and therefore might have trouble when it comes time to sign your check.) When researching this post, I found services that perform background checks for anywhere from $20 – $50. While I’m more interested in individual clients today, check out this article for more information on researching companies.

When Should You Perform a Background Check?

If you are about to enter into a major, long term deal with an individual client, it may very well be in your best interest to subject that person to a background check. This is especially true if you get even a whiff of deceit from this person. Not sure what you’re smelling there? Signs of potential deceit can include anything from using hotmail and refusing to part with other contact information to failing to pay at agreed upon times. Of course, if you’ve already started the project, your background check may be too little too late.

If you do decide to perform a credit check, there are delicate ways to broach the subject. Include statements such as “approval subject to credit check” in your negotiations, or simply write your requirement into your contract.

Maybe I’m naïve, but until I read the Women Day by Day post, I never even thought about running any sort of background check on a client. But I have had my husband shuttle me to a client meeting taking place in a store front office in a particularly shady part of Atlanta. (I hear what you’re thinking. “A shady place in Atlanta? Surely not!”) The meeting turned into a great journalism gig with a community paper, but I was still glad I played it safe. Perhaps I could have given myself a little extra layer of self-confidence by performing a quick criminal check on the publisher I had been asked to meet.

One Caveat – Don’t Rush to Snap Judgments

Before you scamper off to start background checking all your clients, keep one thing in mind – criminal background checks and credit checks are a tool, not the whole toolbox. No matter the results of these checks, use your good judgment when deciding whether or not to work with a client. Further, if you are performing due diligence on a client, be prepared for them to do the same to you. If you are a sole-proprietor and ask a client for his or her social security number, you might end up looking just as suspicious as they do, especially if you refuse to give your own. In their mind, you could be a fraudster, too.

I once had a client who – at a Mad Men-style drinks meeting near the tail end of the project – told me she was thinking of filing bankruptcy. Of course, my blood ran cold. “Is this her way of hinting that I’m not getting paid?” I thought. At the time, I felt it was too impolite to come out and ask, but I did finesse something about my contract into the conversation.

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. Even though she was going through some serious financial trouble, she was wise enough to budget for my services and I was paid within three days of completion of the project. I didn’t exactly feel bad for becoming concerned about payday – I have to protect my interests, after all – but I did realize that I had immediately rushed to a snap judgment.

So say you do find a lien, a bankruptcy or a foreclosure on a credit check. That doesn’t always mean that the person you are working for is a grifter with no intention of paying you. For all you know, there is a perfectly good explanation for the trouble. This is where you are going to have to go with your gut. Perhaps a foreclosure in today’s economy or a misdemeanor arrest for a minor crime 20 years ago isn’t a deal breaker for you. This is where you get to make your own decision.

Here’s my last lecture of the post. Remember, now that you are in business on your own, you are responsible for your own success and failure. You get to tap dance your way to the bank after you’ve made a great decision, and sob alone under your desk whenever you screw up. You have tools – Google, background checks, books, seminars, accountants, lawyers, the advice of other freelancers – that will help you make decisions about your business, but ultimately, the responsibility for you actions as a business owner are on you.

If you want to be the hardass who refuses to work with a client who once missed a credit card payment, that is your right. If you choose to give questionable clients the benefit of the doubt and go with your gut feeling, that’s your right, too. That’s why you’re in business for yourself, my friend.

That’s the fun part.

I’m not really talking about the jobs with horrifying pay (like the .90/300 words posting I saw on Twitter last week) or the ones that are blantantly unethical (like helping some kid cheat his way through college). I’m more curious about whether you refuse to take jobs doing a particular type or writing or writing in a certain industry. I have a two hard and fast ones:

Freelance Grant writing – If I worked for a non-profit, I would write grants for them like there was no tomorrow, but I do not ever foresee myself becoming a freelance grant writer. After taking an intensive Master’s level grant writing class and writing three grants in three short months, I have to tell you that half the pain of grant writing is the fact that you do not work within the organization. A grant is all about capturing a company or nonprofit’s character, its history, and its current goings-on (often insider, only semi-public information, like budgets and plans). Grant writing takes a lot more insider knowledge than even marketing or PR. While it is by no means impossible to write a grant for an organization that you don’t report to every day, it is (and this is just my estimation), about 20 zillion times harder, simply for the reasons I just stated. Nope, I just won’t write it.

Pharmaceutical Companies – This one is for personal reasons. Someone in my immediate family was harmed irreparably by a pharmaceutical company that decided to skip human testing and FDA approval (even though its drug obviously, obviously fell into the category of drugs that needed FDA approval) and market to doctors, who then used it on helpless, premature babies.  Sadly, upon doing research, I found that this dishonesty is not at all rare in the pharmaceutical industry. Yes, I see both sides of the coin where they are trying to keep their R&D funding by producing lots of good drugs, but I feel that there are enough bad apples out there that I can’t in good conscience write for a pharmaceutical company client.

And you know what? The fact that I don’t have to write grants or shill for Big Pharma is the great thing about being self-employed. We don’t have bosses handing work down to us. We choose our own clients. If we have a moral or personal restriction, then we move on to the next client and leave that one to another freelancer.

So how about you? Do you have any “No! I just won’t write it” scenarios?

And it drives me crazy. 

Who died and said that writing a bazillion word sentence with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious shoehorned in three times makes your writing more worthwhile than someone who writes in a clear, concise, readable style?

Let’s consider this excerpt from anthropology. I won’t say I hate most anthropology writing, only that I’m horribly disappointed in it. (Oh, who am I kidding? I despise most anthropology writing like a bride despises the husband she caught cheating on their wedding night. Clearly, this stems from a semester of graduate study toward an anthropology degree.) But I digress. The below text is taken from an abstract of an anthropology paper. No, not the paper itself. The summary.

“The author begins by locating the thesis in the corpus of anthropological literature which acknowledges human suffering and refuses to adopt a position of cultural relativism. The complex and elusive phenomenon of structural violence is unpacked, followed by a description of the setting and the author’s methodology. Clinical observations are presented as contextualised narratives located around three themes: alcohol misuse; gendered violence; and inter-generational violence.” (Roberts, Anthropology & Medicine, 2009.)

This bad boy scores a 21 on the Flesch scale. As high school grads would read on a 12^th grade level, and people with Bachelor’s degrees on a 16^th grade level, I can only assume that this is meant for someone in the eleventybajillionth grade. (Darn, even with that awesomely long word, this paragraph only reads on a 9^th grade level.)

My point is that just because a document is long and full of fifty cent words it isn’t automatically worth more than say, a joke, or a slogan, or a song lyric that gets to the heart of a matter in a few words.  Regular people deserve to understand inaugural addresses, mortgages, and diagnoses. And the subjects of anthropological study damn sure deserve to understand what is being written about them by outsiders. At the risk of sounding like a raging populist, I find it disingenuous (50 cent word alert!) that certain writers try to preserve knowledge for themselves by holding it hostage with polysyllabic shackles.

I want to end with a couple of Flesch grade level scores:

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.” – T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  (1^st grade)

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” (Kindergarten)

And here’s the link to the Flesch calculator I was using. Try not to tear your hair out. (This post? 8^th grade.)

 Theology Essay Help. I am looking for help with an essay (Old Testament prophet) The writer must be able to work with the Harvard referencing  system.  Good communication is essential and the courtesy to give an honest answer as to if or not you can genuinley take on this project is vital.

Seriously? You are looking for someone else to write your theology essay? I especially enjoy the part where you, the cheater, wants to hire “honest” people. 

Why We Won’t Do It

First, shame on you. You are cheating. Your college degree? If you do manage to make it to the big stage, you might as well snatch it out of its attractive frame and tear it up, because you did not earn it. What is a college degree without a record that you actually sat in a class and learned something? When a future employer sees the GPA on your resume, she has a reasonable right to expect that you know the material you purported to study. Put yourself in the place of the losing candidate who did not cheat but ended up with less than your spectacular GPA or degree?  How would you like to be that poor guy that got beaten out by a cheat? May there be a thumbtack in your chair when you sit down on your first day on the job.

I know it might not seem like it now, but learning really is its own reward. I admit I was tempted to skip American Philosophy more than once, but I stuck it out. I also got a B, and that hurt my GPA. But when I look back on my college career I can be proud of learning the material in each and every class without relying on anyone else to do my work for me.

None of this getting through? Then how about listening to a little plain old common sense?

Why it Doesn’t Even Make Sense to Ask

• Like Snowflakes, No Two Writers are Alike – Remember those essay questions you muddled your way through on the midterm? Your professor read those. And unless Jupiter aligns with Neptune, chances are my writing style is going to sound nothing like yours.  Your professor likely has a Ph.D. for pete’s sake. She’s going to notice.
• Neither Are Any Two Classes – Have you ever taken a two part class with different professors? Did you notice that each professor had his own style, preferences and opinions? They are going to want to see these preferences and opinions reflected in your paper.  Academics may seem like dotty old pipe-smokers, but that’s a façade. They disagree. On everything.  Have you ever read a peer review of an academic article? They make the worst YouTube internet flame look like a birthday party invitation. (This is why I can tell you with a certainty to never sit two anthropologists together at your Christmas dinner. Trust me on this one.)

In short, your professor is going to want a paper in a certain style, with certain preferences, predicated on certain theories. The freelancer you hire the night before the paper was due did not take your class. Something’s going to look fishy.

I hope this has explained why a freelance writer with a social conscience will not write your 5-10 page paper on the depiction of migrant works in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.  Now stop asking.