In this series, The Way We Work, Entrepreneur Associate Editor Lydia Belanger examines how people foster productivity, focus, collaboration, creativity and culture in the workplace. If your criminal record is a clean slate, you probably don't think too much about background checks. But probability suggests it's almost certain that someone you work with has one. What constitutes a criminal record can range from minor to major crimes, from fishing without a license to speeding to driving under the influence to murder. But historically, some background check processes haven't distinguished among offenses of varying degrees. The Ban the Box movement has pushed to remove the "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?"

If someone commits a crime away from their home state, a screener could miss a conviction. Records might be missing, outdated, or incorrect. Both humans and machines can misread court documents, or erroneously include convictions for someone with the same name. But the pair argue that machines are better than humans at sifting through documents. Checkr has faced lawsuits under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which gives people the right to dispute inaccurate information found in background checks.