Criminal checks

There are times when doing a background check without a date of birth can be useful. If you need to check out a neighbor, for example, you might not happen to know his birthdate. For a casual search like this, with no FCRA implications, it is usually possible to search a criminal database by name only — and we provide this option on our criminal search page. Assuming the name is not incredibly common, and you know roughly where the person lives and their approximate age, you can have a pretty good idea of which criminal records are relevant to them.

But this is not good enough for a pre-employment background check. In that case it is important to get records for the exact person in question, and no-one else. So we need to narrow them down by an additional identifier. The two that are most commonly used are date of birth (DOB) and social security number (SSN).

Employers often ask for a reliable way to do a background check without a date of birth. They are afraid to ask candidates for their date of birth because they are concerned that it will open […]