The conviction on your record and the job you applied for
California sequenced the hiring process by statute: no conviction questions until the offer, an individualized assessment before any rejection, and written notice with a real chance to respond. Most employers skip steps. Each skipped step is a claim.
Nearly every piece on this site protects people inside a job. This one protects the door. A criminal record in California is not a lawful all-purpose “no” — the Fair Chance Act converted rejection-by-checkbox into a regulated procedure, and background-check law wrapped the file itself in consent and disclosure rules. If you have a record and a rescinded offer, the question is not whether the employer could say no. It is whether it said no the way the statute requires — and it probably did not.
1 · The sequence the law requires
For employers of five or more, conviction history is off-limits until after a conditional offer: not on the application, not in the interview, not through an early background check.1 Once an offer is made and history surfaces, the employer cannot simply revoke. It must conduct an individualized assessment — the nature and gravity of the offense, the time elapsed, the nature of the job sought — and if it intends to rescind, deliver written preliminary notice identifying the disqualifying conviction, hold the decision open at least five business days for your response (evidence of rehabilitation, inaccuracy, context), actually consider what you submit, and only then issue a final decision with notice of your right to complain to the Civil Rights Department.
Read that sequence against what actually happened to you. The offer that evaporated in a same-day phone call, the rejection that never named the conviction, the “five days” that were never offered — each is a departure from a mandatory step, and the departures are where these cases live.
2 · What was never askable at all
Some history is excluded from the conversation entirely, offer or no offer: arrests that did not end in conviction, referrals to and participation in diversion programs, and convictions that have been sealed, dismissed, or expunged.2 California’s expanding clean-slate machinery makes this set larger every year — which means the background report itself may be reporting things the law forbids anyone to consider, a problem that belongs to the next section.
3 · The report has its own rules
Background checks run through consumer-reporting statutes with independent teeth: clear standalone disclosure and your written consent before the report is pulled, a copy to you on request, and — before any adverse action based on the report — notice and the report itself, so inaccuracies can be contested.3 Background-check files are wrong at rates that would embarrass any other industry: mismatched names, stale cases, records that were sealed years ago. An employer who rejected you over a report you never saw has usually violated the reporting statutes whether or not the Fair Chance analysis would have saved the offer.
4 · How these cases are built
From paper the process itself generates: the application’s unlawful checkbox, the timing of the background check against the offer, the notices sent or skipped, the report’s contents against the court file. Damages track the lost job — and pattern discovery reaches every applicant processed the same way, which concentrates employer attention wonderfully. The claims run to the CRD on the familiar FEHA track, alongside the reporting-statute remedies.
5 · This week
Get the report: you are entitled to it, and reading it is step one. Pull the actual court records for anything it lists — sealed and dismissed matters still appearing are their own violation and often fixable quickly. Save the application, the offer, and every notice, with dates. Then bring the stack to us. People who have served their sentence are not sentenced to unemployment; the Legislature said so in statute, and statutes are what we enforce.
Notes
- Gov. Code §12952 (Fair Chance Act).
- Lab. Code §432.7.
- Civ. Code §1786 et seq. (ICRAA); 15 U.S.C. §1681 et seq. (FCRA).
Related writing: How discrimination is actually proved · The CRD complaint and the right-to-sue letter
This article states California law as of its revision date and is analysis, not legal advice. Reading this site does not create an attorney-client relationship. Attorney advertising.