Well, nothing is worse than perhaps a felony conviction =)
This depends on the employer or how they do the background check. A felony charge and conviction all shows up in the documentation when they do the background check. It is worse to have a pending case (which is what a dropped felony charge looks like in certain databases) than to have a case that was resolved years ago.
In some cases, if you're lucky, you can have the charges dropped/resolved without conviction and then petition to have them sealed by the court maybe 6 months or a year later. That assumes this was your first offense. Then, the charges will NOT show up on a background check, and can only come back if you commit another crime of similar type where someone (the DA) petitions the court to re-open the records to show a pattern or something.
In the US, when doing an NCIC check, this is not always true. The charge still shows up. Even if the charges were sealed, this does not stop a brief summary of it from showing up on an NCIC records check done by an employer.
While there may be some way to have it removed, the fact is that if you go through the process of having things sealed, and every lawyer and court clerk etc involved says it is sealed and can't be seen by anyone, this in no way means that it will not show up on an NCIC search. If there is a way to have it removed from NCIC, this is not commonly known by lawyers and people who get this done are in the minority.