This is my experience as well, although I've also found that some of the companies they hire to do these checks are borderline incompetent. The last time I had

This is my experience as well, although I've also found that some of the companies they hire to do these checks are borderline incompetent. The last time I had a background check, despite providing the name, address, and phone numbers of past employers to the background check firm, the resulting report indicated in several cases they had instead called unrelated companies in unrelated industries in states I had never lived or worked in. There were no repercussions when those companies (understandably) had never heard for me. Presumably, HR had checked the box that the check was performed, but they didn't actually care about the result. One of the cases they flagged as "unable to verify employment" was a stint at a company I had founded, where I'm still listed as the LLC manager on my state's business registration website, i.e. a simple Google search for company + my name would have sufficed. (The name of the construction firm in a neighboring state that they repeatedly called instead wasn't even similar.)