I posted about a company I used to work for and how they did comprehensive background checks on all of their employees including the janitor.  I thought it was ridiculous that they would do a credit check on a janitor and it made it extremely difficult to hire for that low level position.

Then Jeri posted about Obama’s background questionnaire on the CrimCheck blog (here’s a link to the actual PDF document) and it just about knocked me over.

One of the praises of the incoming Obama administration is their openness to transparency and their embracing of technology. Obama has even done chats on YouTube. So I have to seriously wonder if this strategy makes sense for hiring the best possible people into his administration. It has always been my experience that the more tedious and complicated you make the process for hiring, you will lose your highest qualified people and be left with people who either are desperate and willing to go through the pain or true brand believers. That is certainly not the best brand mix.

So imagine you are a mid-level policy analyst on Russia and you want to work for the Obama administration. This isn’t like the Secretary of State or even a Deputy Administrator, we are talking about a mid-level bureaucrat who has probably been criminally under paid in educational and policy organizations and looking to perhaps get a boost and actually have their research do something other than go into a file that nobody ever reads. Great! Apply to be an adviser to the President!

But here’s the problem:

1. Your husband owns a gun and you don’t know whether or not it has always been properly registered.
2. Your Facebook page has a picture of you at a party.
3. A former supervisor was arrested for fraud five years ago.
4. Your father worked for AIG for a number of years before retiring

If you answer all of these and the 59 other questions the Obama administration would like you to answer (including tax returns, loans, personal diary entries?), then maybe you could get a job with the Obama administration.

More than likely though, if you are a talented Russian analyst and you don’t want to give up information about your children’s trust accounts or who gave you more than a $50 gift at your graduation party, you close the application and you move on. So who ends up plugging through the long application? Either people who truly buy into Obama and want to be part of his administration no matter what cost or people who are so desperate, they are willing to go to any length to get a well paid, temporary job. And if you leave off a detail (on purpose or accidentally), who is going to vet through some of this stuff? If you forget that you had a MySpace account that you created two years ago, are they going to find you?

Is this the best talent strategy for some of the most important positions in the country? Is the length of the application absolutely necessary? Given the length of application, does Obama have the staff necessary to properly vet all the information contained in the application? How does this relate to your background check policy?