Ask Lemmy

Depends. If you're looking to work somewhere that has a public image, social media is likely to be a factor. Anything involving safety or serious liability will need drug screenings. Outside of that, it depends on how much the company is willing to pay for screenings. They have to pay for them for candidates, and they're not cheap. I've done work in background check software and can tell you costs range from the low hundreds to sometimes over a thousand bucks per candidate, particularly if a candidate has gone by a lot of names and lived in a lot of places. You end up with a big combinatorial of identities to do criminal records requests for from different jurisdictions across the country. Some jurisdictions require a phone call to request records, and I can think of at least one where someone has to literally go pick up documents from a courthouse in person. On top of that, some drug panels are quite expensive. Social media review usually takes a lot of a real person's time to go through; hard to automate if you want to be thorough beyond just pointing at a Facebook profile to scrape and feed through an LLM, and some kinds of posts are relevant to some employers vs others.

If you're concerned, 7 years is the industry norm for how far back they consider your past unless it's for like a professional certification or degree.