More of your personal information is available for potential employers to check on than at any time in history. Employers are checking social networking profiles, websites, and even credit scores to check out how their potential employees might perform.

Although there’s not any hard statistics available, the best guess is that anywhere from 40-50% of employers are running credit checks on potential employees, but a new study indicate that those efforts might be fruitless. Eastern Kentucky University released a study finding that there’s absolutely no correlation between credit scores and job performance.

Employers might be using the wrong tool to judge their potential employees, but you still need to keep your credit score in check. A recent report from the Los Angeles Times indicates that one in three credit reports contain some form of errors. Many of these are serious enough where it could mean the difference between getting a job or a loan and getting rejected.

With your credit score, the best offense is a good defense. You need to check your credit score on a semi-annual basis to lookout for errors. Fortunately, you can check out your credit report online for free at Annual Credit Report.com. Don’t bother with sites like FreeCreditReport.com, the only legitimate site to get a free credit report is AnnualCreditReport.com, it’s a site specially setup by the credit bureaus to meet the requirements of a piece of congressional legislation that required credit reporting agencies to provide consumers free access to their credit reports.

If you find that there’s something inaccurate on your credit report, you must dispute it with the individual credit bureau and the issuer of the credit. Send all of your supporting evidence via certified mail and tell the credit issuer that you’ll sue them if they don’t fix the mistake in a timely fashion.



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