NEW YORK -- Employers, increasingly security conscious and wary of making mistakes in hiring, have stepped up reference checks and background screening of job applicants, according to a new survey.

In the survey of personnel officers, released this week by the Society for Human Resource Management, 96 percent said their companies conduct some type of background or reference check on people applying for job openings.

The most common check by companies is a verification of an applicant's legal right to work in the United States, with 85 percent of those polled saying they always do such a screening. But 68 percent of those surveyed said their firms always run criminal records checks on applicants, and another 13 percent say they sometimes perform such checks, according to the survey.

Heightened concerns about security are driving some of the increased screening, according to the survey. About one in five of those surveyed said their companies have added or updated screening practices as a direct result of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Employers also are acting as a legal precaution. More than eight in 10 of those surveyed say their check procedures include standardized questions, designed to gather the same type of information about all candidates while avoiding subjects like race or marital status to protect against later charges of discrimination in hiring.

Applicants for management jobs receive the most scrutiny -- 86 percent to 89 percent of those surveyed indicated they always run checks on people being considered for different tiers of management jobs. Eighty-three percent said they always run some type of check on applicants for salaried, non-management jobs and 75 percent said they screen people being considered for hourly positions.

The last time SHRM queried its members on reference checks was in 1998, and it has restructured its survey since then, making direct comparisons difficult.

In the 1998 survey, 89 percent said they regularly conducted reference checks on candidates for professional positions, and 68 percent reported doing so on candidates for skilled-labor jobs. At that time, most of the screening focused on an applicant's past work history, rather than any criminal record.

The new survey was done in August by e-mail, and tapped a random sample of members in SHRM, a professional association for people who work in personnel departments. It is based on responses from 345 people, out of 1,926 who received the original query. The margin of error, while varying slightly by question, is roughly +/- 5.25 percent.