Did The Backup Kick Off?

I'm looking to run something outside of the agent that will determine whether or not the backup ran. I will probably create a sp and run it from the command line as a scheduled job. However, I'm having a little trouble when it comes time to compare the max(run_date) from the sysjobhistory table in msdb with the current date. The info is stored in sysjobhistory as an int (for example, July 6, 2002 is stored as 20020706). I can run a datepart command on the getdate function to get something like this 200276. These dates of course are the same, but naturally they do not equal each other through a comparison (I'm converting both to varchar for the compare). Is there any formatting that could get me 20020706 from my datepart command - or is there a better way of doing this altogether?