When you are creating your resume, you don’t need to put every random job you’ve ever had. What companies do is they look at your jobs on the resume, and at most call the employer and ask them if you worked for them and how you did at the job.
There is no way for a non government employee to know if you worked other jobs. Keep off any jobs that you worked at for less than 2 years and use every skill you learned as a skill for your resume.
Nothing hurts your resume more than having 3 or 4 jobs in a span of 2 years because it shows you are unreliable.
Last two places I worked we used HireRight to run background checks on all new hires. I have my own document. I worked in Cyber; one company was data analytics, the other was finance.
The service will take the information you submitted at application and verifiy if it is true. They literally call former employers and the schools you list (college only). They run a public records check and when its all done, it goes to the HR goons. I never saw the reports except my own. Each one costs about $600. There are always some minor discrepancies, the company will add a note; if there are little ones, they will note and advise that there is nothing concerning. I never had one come back bad. A different leader did, and it just means that they have a conversation with the candidate and let them explain.
On mine, I had some criminal history hits for a different person with the same name as me. They were in states where I did not live and it was pretty clear it was someone else. They also did a credit report.
So they are real and they do happen. They are VERY thorough. They are also expensive and most places dont want to pay for them. I had it done as I was a senior director in cyber security. I doubt all parts of the workforce have it done.
I can see that for a security role… maybe. It would have been a massive waste of time and money for what we were doing, though. Plus, this was during the good old times when people weren’t being fired left and right. If anything it was hard to find people with the right qualifications that were still available. People in the field were getting hired directly out of school. If you could pass the tests, do the job and not act like a psychopath during interviews there were very few things that would have disqualified you.
I’ll also say that I’m pretty sure some of what you describe would have been illegal over here, at least for most jobs.