There are always reasons why you may want to find out more about a person. For instance, maybe you’re a hiring manager, and you’re thinking about giving them a job within your organization. You feel like they’re a good fit, but you want to do your due diligence.
Maybe you’re dating someone, and you feel like you should get closer to them. However, you don’t know them all that well, and you want to see if they’re concealing anything from you. You can trust them, but also verify what they say.
Maybe you’re going into business with someone, but you want to know more about them before you tie your future in with theirs. It’s not inappropriate to do a public records search before making that move.
We’ll talk more about public records searches right now. When we finish, you’ll understand how they work and how much information about someone they can potentially yield.
The Basics
Accessing public records online is not all that difficult these days. You can do it yourself in many instances. You will need to look up a person’s name with any online database that the public can access.
Some companies can do that for you. You pay them a nominal fee, and then they can find out whether a person has a spouse, whether they have a criminal record, financial information about them, and so forth.
Going through one of these companies costs a little bit, but it’s pretty affordable. What’s nice about using one of these companies instead of hunting for this information yourself is that they usually have proprietary software programs that can go through essentially the entire internet all at once. They won’t look for this information piecemeal in the same way that you would do it.
If you utilize one of these companies, you can very quickly get a full picture of this person and what’s going on in their life. If you have any doubts about them, this method should confirm your suspicions or let you know they’re groundless.
How Can You Know Whether There’s a Public Record for Something?
If you want to know about someone, there’s usually a ton of information about them. An individual might try to scrub every mention of themselves off the internet. However, unless the government deliberately did that for them, you should find traces, even if this isn’t the sort of person who has a lot of social media profiles.
Let’s say that you look for someone via public records yourself rather than hiring a company to do it for you. You can search any record that a public agency has posted online, and many of them exist.
Property records are generally public. You can find out whether someone owns property and whether they own that property outright or some other entity or person does. You can find out whether there’s a lien on that property.
You can find out about someone’s immigration status if they are not a US citizen. You can find out about their driving record. If they’ve ever had a DUI or anything like that, you can quickly discover it. Something like that will certainly come in handy if you’re thinking about hiring this person.
You can find out whether they have a criminal record. If you’re going to hire someone, and you find out they have a drug-related misdemeanor, you probably won’t let that interfere with the hiring decision. If you find out that they just got out of prison because of some heinous crime, you will probably think twice about giving them a job.
Public Agencies Must Have Transparent Records
The point is that any public agency must have records that anyone can see. They need to post that information online, where you or anyone else can access it.
When we say public agency, that could be one at the local, state, or federal level. Any time you have an agency where the records should be available for the public’s good, you can probably access them. Exceptions occasionally exist, but if you go to one of these agency websites and do an information search, you will usually find what you need.
The reason why it sometimes makes sense to hire an agency to do this work for you, though, is that the way you look someone up on any of these websites can vary. The information is probably there, but you will have to figure out how to navigate that site to find it.
It seems that should be easy, but keep in mind that we’re talking about government bureaucracies here. If you think that every one of them functions in a way that makes sense, you’ll probably learn differently pretty quickly.
It Can Benefit You to Look Someone Up
There are undeniably times when looking someone up via a public records search can benefit you. We’ve mentioned several of them, and you can probably think of plenty more.
Maybe you have an operating budget, like if you’re a hiring manager and you’re trying to find out about someone before you decide whether to employ them. You will probably want to use one of these public record search services that we mentioned.
For one thing, it can save you time. If you have several candidates for the same position, and you want to know about all of them, it’s not likely you’ll want to hunt through public records on a bunch of websites yourself.
If you’re looking through public records to find out about someone for another reason, you may not have the money to pay one of these companies. If that’s the case, you’ll need to go to the particular government site where you want to locate the person and figure out how to use it.
Some are easier than others, and hopefully, it won’t take you long to find what you need. That information is usually there, and if you’re determined, there’s no reason you can’t uncover it.
