Assuming the record was as an adult, it will be reported publicly by the county (or other jurisdiction) court system and be on public record. This used to be a musty records keeping office somewhere you'd have to go in person and request the records of the individual in question - so without prior knowledge of where a conviction was it was difficult to "background check" people without extensive investigation.
Then these became digitized and put on-line most places.
The larger issue is data brokers who aggregate the records of literally everyone in the entire US (or close to it) into one database you can pay them to make lookups into. They send someone to every courthouse in the US (well, they sub-contract others who sub-contract, etc.) and get all new records. This builds a nationally searchable database that more or lives on indefinitely. All legal since the records are public information.
You can get records sealed and such by court order, but once it's aggregated it's basically a game of whack-a-mole. You can go further and get it expunged which typically requires a state governor signature or similar, where then you might have better luck with said data brokers as the penalties for reporting it are heavy in some states.
It's a very fractionalized system, built out of bailing wire and duct tape like most such records are in the US for historical reasons.
Some employers simply have a binary policy of "zero criminal records" and don't go any further into detail beyond that. Other employers are more lenient, but the more desirable a job is the more likely you are to run into the former policy.
Assuming the record was as an adult, it will be reported publicly by the county (or other jurisdiction) court system and be on public record. This used to be a musty records keeping office somewhere you'd have to go in person and request the records of the individual in question - so without prior knowledge of where a conviction was it was difficult to "background check" people without extensive investigation.
Then these became digitized and put on-line most places.
The larger issue is data brokers who aggregate the records of literally everyone in the entire US (or close to it) into one database you can pay them to make lookups into. They send someone to every courthouse in the US (well, they sub-contract others who sub-contract, etc.) and get all new records. This builds a nationally searchable database that more or lives on indefinitely. All legal since the records are public information.
You can get records sealed and such by court order, but once it's aggregated it's basically a game of whack-a-mole. You can go further and get it expunged which typically requires a state governor signature or similar, where then you might have better luck with said data brokers as the penalties for reporting it are heavy in some states.
It's a very fractionalized system, built out of bailing wire and duct tape like most such records are in the US for historical reasons.
Some employers simply have a binary policy of "zero criminal records" and don't go any further into detail beyond that. Other employers are more lenient, but the more desirable a job is the more likely you are to run into the former policy.