Not when you apply. Now. Today.
Background investigators pull your driving record, your credit, your social media going back years, and they call people you forgot you knew. The post you made at 19 and the unpaid ticket from two years ago are both sitting there waiting.
What you can do about it: clean up what’s fixable — pay the tickets, handle the debts, scrub the posts. And for what’s not fixable, tell the truth. Departments hire people with mistakes in their past every day.
They don’t hire people who lie about them, and the polygraph is where clean-looking stories go to die.
Got a background question you’ve been afraid to ask?
Ask it here. No judgment — better to hear it from me than from an investigator.