Choose the right package
The first decision is what to order. Most clients settle on two or three standard packages and only deviate for senior or safety-sensitive roles. Here's how to think about it:
Basic
SSN trace, address history, national criminal database, and national sex offender registry. Fast and cheap. Appropriate for roles with low fiduciary or safety exposure - seasonal, internship, or entry-level non-driving roles. Not appropriate as a sole check for most full-time hires, because the national criminal database is an aggregated index, not a true primary-source search.
Plus
Everything in Basic, plus a 7-year county criminal search at every county where the applicant has lived or worked. This is the workhorse package for most full-time employment screening. The county search is what turns a background check from a cheap data lookup into an actual records-based check.
Premium
Plus, extended with federal criminal search, motor vehicle record, and either employment verification, education verification, or both. This is the default for management, fiduciary, driving, and professional roles.
Custom
Build a package from any combination of our products. Common custom combinations include: finance roles (Premium + credit report), healthcare (Premium + OIG/SAM + professional license verification), and government contractors (Premium + federal criminal + federal civil + international if foreign residence).
Enter applicant details
Enter the applicant's legal name, date of birth, SSN, email, and phone. The email is how the applicant receives the disclosure and authorization invitation, so double-check it. The SSN is encrypted end-to-end - we store only a salted hash for lookup and transmit the plain value only to authorized data sources that require it for matching.
A few fields that trip up new users:
- Legal name. Not preferred name, not hyphenated-short-form. Run the check against the name on the applicant's government ID. If the applicant has used an alias or a maiden name, add it as a known alias - we'll search those too.
- Date of birth. Required for almost every court. Without it, the courthouse can't distinguish between people with the same name. This is the single biggest cause of false-positive results across the industry.
- Address history. You can let the SSN trace populate address history (default) or ask the applicant to enter it during the disclosure step. Applicant-entered addresses are usually more complete for recent moves; trace-discovered addresses catch older ones.
Send the invitation
Click "Send invite." The applicant receives an email with a secure link to the disclosure and authorization form. They complete identity-confirm fields, read and sign the FCRA disclosure, and sign the authorization. Most applicants complete this in under ten minutes on their phone.
If the applicant doesn't complete the form within 72 hours, the portal sends an automated reminder. You can also resend manually from the order's detail page. If the applicant still doesn't complete after a week, the order auto-cancels and you're not billed.
Track progress
Each component of the check shows live status on the order's detail page:
- Pending - component hasn't started (typically because it's waiting on an upstream result, e.g., county search waiting on address history).
- In progress - component is actively running. Shows who's running it and when it was last touched.
- Needs attention - component has hit a snag and needs manual review. The portal shows the reason.
- Complete - component is done. The result is visible in the partial report.
Most Plus orders complete end-to-end in 24 to 48 business hours. Premium orders with verifications typically take 2 to 3 business days because employment verifications depend on the responsiveness of the former employer.
Handle common delays
A handful of situations routinely slow a check down. Here's what they look like and what to do.
Courthouse closed or paper-only
A nontrivial number of U.S. county courts are paper-only or have limited research windows. When we encounter one, we dispatch a paralegal on the next business day the court is open. Expect 3 to 5 business days for paper-only counties - less common now than five years ago, but still a real thing in rural jurisdictions. No action required on your end; we'll tell you upfront if the order hits one.
Common name, DOB mismatch
If the court returns a record for someone with the same name but a different DOB, we don't report it. If the DOB matches but the address or SSN doesn't, we flag it for manual review and pull additional identifiers (middle name, court-record identifiers) to confirm or exclude. You'll see a "needs attention" status if a record requires this kind of disambiguation.
Former employer unresponsive
Employment verifications rely on either The Work Number, direct HR contact, or in rare cases the applicant providing a W-2. If a former employer won't respond after three contact attempts (typical turnaround: 48 hours between attempts), we'll escalate and ask you whether to mark it "unable to verify" or request the applicant supply a W-2 or paystub. Most of our clients accept "unable to verify" on non-recent employment and only escalate to the applicant for the most recent 1 to 2 employers.
International candidate
If the applicant lived outside the U.S. in the last 7 years, the check may require in-country research. We scope this at intake and tell you the realistic turnaround for each country. Most Western European and Canadian checks complete in 5 to 10 business days. Some countries (Germany, Brazil, India) require specific applicant-signed consent forms beyond the U.S. standard. We'll let you know upfront if any additional steps are required.
Cancel or modify an in-progress order
You can cancel an order at any point before the report is complete. You'll be billed only for components that have already finished. To modify - for example, to add a component after the order has started - open the order and click "Add component." The new component runs as if it had been part of the original order.
Next up
See Reading reports for how to interpret findings once the check is complete, and Adverse action if the report contains potentially disqualifying information.