Comment Re:Lie (Score 1) 720
Doing that could get you fired, and for gross misconduct to boot. Gross misconduct might deprive you of unemployment and COBRA benefits. Usually it gets avoided so there's no need to prove that in court, but it is simple to prove in the case you lied on a form and they caught you out.
If he's truly desperate, he could try to lie, but I seriously advise against it. If you like working in IT, you don't want to piss off the people you work with like that. Word gets around. Even in big towns, people in IT frequently see each other again.
I would tend more towards getting in the door in some indirect way where they don't conduct the background check or can somehow be convinced that it isn't a big deal. There are some places that would at least listen to you, if your position isn't particularly sensitive.
Our company does do background checks, and I ensure all my admins are checked. We have responsibility for credit card numbers and it is part of our information security program to get them done. I can't say if the check will definitely find his felony, but I can tell you that if he lied and it did, I'd immediately fire him. It's one thing to be a past criminal who has served your time. It's another thing to be a past criminal who is still lying. It tends to reinforce the idea that you can't be trusted.
I have sympathy for his position, be he needs to not lie about it. What he needs is a situation where someone will accept his explanations and character references or for the question to not come up. People fudge things all the time, like their skills or education, but this is not something you can fudge and have it not come back to haunt you unless you are very lucky.
I'd might suggest he consider being a developer. You might still get checked, but usually the only people who *need* checks are administrators who have production access. That's why we do our best to lock down production and keep everyone else out. That allows the rest of the company to not have to deal with crazy audit and checking requirements. All you have to deal with then are your change control process and tests. Since there is the expectation that we can't trust code that goes in, we don't have to trust the developers completely. I'm not sure how viable that is, but it could work.