How strict are pre-employment credit checks?

[thegill]

Hi guys... wasn't sure whether to post this here or in the jobs forum but thought that looked more like a classifieds forum... feel free to move it!

basically I've been lucky enough to receive a conditional offer from one of the banks in London in a graduate mergers and acquisitions role... predictably one of the pre-employment checks is a credit check.

Now my credit record isn't terrible (no CCJs, defaults or anything like that) but its not perfect either. About the worst it gets is that it shows I have made 6 late payments on my credit card over the last 31 months (I would have thought that sort of thing was quite common amongst students, though).

Does anyone know how strict an employer is likely to be in making their credit check? Obviously requirements might be a bit higher for a finance job. I'm sure I'll be ok... like I said I dont consider my credit record to be too bad, but I really dont know what they're looking for.

Anyone have any experience with this?

Thanks!

[BumFLuff]

You will be fine with late payments, however if you have CCJ's or if have been bankrupt you would have a problem. I've been IT contracting in Banking for last 10 years and have been credit checked for every job.

[trunnie]

Probably not a problem. Banks in general are concerned to see that their employees are not under undue financial pressure that may lead them to slip their hand into the till/be bribed to favour a customer's application. Hence the credit check, even if not a regulatory requirement.

What you do need to be careful about is if anything in your credit check would show that you haven't been entirely honest about information in other parts of the recruitment process. Bank's tend to view that fairly seriously as it may be thought of as being dishonest.

[m4tt]

Should be ok. When I recently switched jobs I was slightly concerned about it, its a nail biting few days. But when I mentioned that I was slightly concerned because I had been refused credit a few months prior (which I realised was probably because I hadn't moved my voting address)

Anyway cut a long life story short, they said that they would discuss whatever the result was and even if it was bad it wouldn't rule me out completely. Might pay to discuss it with the recruiter or the recruiting manager?