Pre-employment credit checks

Not true. These are soft checks that don't affect your score (we do quite a few of them).

And it is relevant to certain positions - positions with any kind of financial responsibility (from handling cash to ordering to a/p processing, etc). If someone is heavily in debt, has lots of open collections, etc it can certainly be indicative of a motivation to steal and/or act improperly. It can also be reflective of the candidate's sense of responsibility, commitment to obligations, etc.

These checks require the consent of the employee being checked, so if they don't like it , they don't have to agree to it. While I definitely think that that pass/fail standards need to be set beforehand so employers can't just use them to "peek" into an employee's financial history, there is a lot of room for interpretation of mitigating circumstances (medical collections b/c of slow insurance companies, bad credit from a divorce situation, etc). There's a lot of potential for abuse there. I also think that they should be used in conjunction with a thorough background check.