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During my interview, I was asked if I ever worked for their company or one of its affiliates - to which I answered yes; I had worked for one of the companies it had acquired in the past.

My questions are:

  • Will the company investigate my prior work history with the bought-out company?
  • What level of information will they have about my prior work with the bought-out company?
  • Will my having resigned from my prior post have any affect on their decision (assuming they have this level of detail.)

I've received an offer contingent upon my preemployment screening - which includes criminal background, employment verification, and drug test.

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  • I did answer yes and since my employment they have been acquired by another. Both are large companies and the preinterview process begins with their in-house recruiters. When the offer is made they use a third-party verifier. I am only asking because you truly never know if you are trying-hirable nothing major and good relations with mgt. but I wasn’t perfect:) the offer is a huge opportunity and the pre employment screening is agonizing. So my hopes is they wouldn’t have wasted months pre offer before they verified internally. – Crimsonred Jun 30 '19 at 2:23
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    To answer your question. I did resign due to the fact that the company was considering shutting the office location. They allowed for the employees to pursue other jobs. – Crimsonred Jun 30 '19 at 2:26
  • I just submitted a drastic rewrite to the question. Hope nobody (especially the OP) minds - but I think the question as-written isn't really conveying what the OP is asking. And the title was atrocious for the actual question - it made it sound like they were doing a survey for who worked at Company XYZ. – Kevin Jun 30 '19 at 5:08
  • This seems to be a totally different question after the edit... Asking what information is much more general compared to did you work for X... – Solar Mike Jun 30 '19 at 6:52
  • Thanks for your response Joe. I’m surprised there is the ability to edit a question from other users? The edit Is not at all what I was inquiring - thanks for recognizing Mike. – Crimsonred Jun 30 '19 at 15:33
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Different companies are different. I would suspect the usual case is that they would check, but they'd be looking for things such as a negative employee record and adverse conditions on the termination of the arrangement. For example, if you threatened your former boss when you left, they'd make note of that and probably not offer a job. But if you left for normal reasons without a scene, or you had a very good reason for leaving, such as they were looking at shutting down that office, there wouldn't be a problem from that.

However, as I'm not in HR, I can only say for sure about the two companies whose processes in this regard were clearly notable:

  • One of them did not check at all. Six months after firing someone for a variety of things including workplace violence and threats of violence, they hired him back at another location and had to go through the whole thing again.

  • One of them does the check for former employment regardless of what you filled out on your application. If there's a mismatch between your application and the results of that check and there's no clear room for confusion, any offer is rescinded (failed background check.) If there's room for ambiguity, they call to discuss it. I had a coworker who'd gotten such a call before he was hired - he hadn't known about one of the company's acquisitions.

It's possibly worth noting that employees are generally allowed to pursue other jobs. If a company feels the need to explicitly state that employees are allowed to pursue other jobs for some reason, I'm pretty sure this means "we will have no ill will regarding your departure should you leave at this time giving proper notice and without causing a scene." It could even mean, "We really do not want to fire anyone but we have too many people working here to keep this store open, so rather than having layoffs, we're just laying this out there and hoping some people will find other jobs and thus reduce our headcount. Thanks."

TL;DR: Your prior employment with them should not provide any obstacle to your future employment with them, based on what you've said.

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