5 Features to Look For in the Best Background Check Sites

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Employees are the face of your company, so you don’t want to hire someone only to find arrest records on their profile later. Because of this, you only want to hire the best candidates and turn off any applicant who, after screening by the background check website, may not fit your company values. This shows why background check websites are more crucial today than ever before. 

However, many companies today offer background check services, making it hard to identify the perfect screening provider. If you’re struggling you identify the best background check service, look no further. This guide will highlight crucial features to look for in a background check website to ensure you’re successful during the hiring process. Let’s get started. 

1. Check For Accreditation and Legal Compliance 

Many background check sites can make choosing a trustworthy employee screening company confusing. An effective approach to filtering out untrustworthy companies is checking whether they have the necessary credentials to do business. Therefore, you should ask a background screening company if they have accreditation 

An example of such accreditation you should look for is one by the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Another equally important accreditation is that offered by the Professional Background Screening Association. 

Besides accreditation, you want to work with a background check company that can prove to you their compliance measures. This helps you avoid the unwanted situation of a Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) violation when screening a potential employee. The company should also be aware of the additional local and state laws and regulations which you must observe to avoid non-compliance, thereby attracting costly fines and penalties.  

2. Quick Turnaround Times 

You don’t want to work with a background check company that’s excessively slow in screening your potential employees, as this negatively affects your onboarding process. This slow pace might be due to a lack of enough resources or enough staff to gather information about a potential employee accurately and quickly. As a result, you’re forced to wait for an unreasonably long duration and risk losing top candidates who get poached by other companies. 

Knowing this, you must choose a screening company that promises to give you accurate results within a couple of days. A standard criminal search should take anything between 24 to 48 hours, but a basic criminal search will take a much shorter time. But the screening process will take much longer for searches, including education, employment, and reference checks. 

3. Accessible and Intuitive System 

Although you want a background screening company to issue you a potential candidate’s information on time, it’s equally important the information is accurate. This is why you must look into the efficiency and accuracy of a background check site. 

A great clue to help you pick out a reliable one is by going for one that boasts tried and tested connections and databases. With such systems in place, the company can pinpoint avoidable mistakes such as missing information or clerical errors. 

4. Access to State and Non-Public Information 

You want to work with a background check site with access to crucial state records that are free or available at a minimal fee in some states. Here, the screening company can collect vital information about an interviewing candidate, such as pending cases, arrest records, and criminal records, to name a few. This saves you the hassle of going through the state websites by yourself to find this information, further delaying the onboarding process. 

In addition, the background check company should be able to access non-public details such as your interviewee’s name, phone number, and address. A reliable screening company needs to be in a position to get such information even when not public through different techniques such as dark web scans and state records, to name a few. 

5. Social Media Searches 

In the current digital world, almost everyone is signed up to at least one social media platform. And such platforms are a great place to look at if you’re an employer as they allow you to better understand your interviewee’s true character. This is why you must ask a background check site whether they offer social media searches before rendering for their services. And while a screening company that offers social media searches as one of its services might charge more, they’re without a doubt worth it. 

During the social media searches, the information about a potential employee to be collected includes the social media platforms they use and how many accounts the individual has, among others. And if the interviewee often uses social media, you’ll be able to get all the information you want about them from their accounts.