First Advantage’s ‘Collaborate’ events are a series of global conferences dedicated to background screening for our valued customers, partners, and invited guests. At Collaborate Singapore, we released some unique data from our annual 2025 Global Trends Report, revealing significant trends in background check speed, global screening, and risk management.
But how can your organisation best leverage these insights?
We recommend your organisation conducts an annual review of your screening programs. This way, you can adapt to trends and best practices, better align with evolving regulations, and achieve your business goals.
Whether you’re a First Advantage customer or exploring new screening partners, this review will help provide useful tips to boost hiring confidence, improve efficiency, and help you stay competitive.
To make it easy, we’ve created an Annual Screening Checklist – download it now and discover all the benefits of each item below.
Is my background screening program fast enough?
In the age of rapid technological advancement and digital transformation, speed is arguably just as important to the overall screening process as risk mitigation and cost. More specifically, thanks to the growing role of automation and AI technology, background checks are becoming significantly faster each year, and implementing a virtually seamless screening program is no longer merely an effective strategy for boosting efficiency, but it’s essential for those looking to optimise candidate experiences and secure top talent in today’s highly competitive market.
Should I verify a candidate’s identity before a background check?
Verifying a candidate’s identity at the outset of the hiring process, before conducting a background check, can help employers flag inaccurate or fraudulent personal information that might otherwise go unnoticed. This can help to mitigate risk that the the information provided by the candidate is not accurate before the background check takes place.
There’s now a wide range of identity-first screening solutions available, many of which are straightforward to implement and important from a risk management perspective. In Singapore, for example, there has been a concerning trend involving the compromise of Singpass (Singapore Personal Access), the country’s digital identity system used for accessing government services and transactions.
In the recruitment context, identity wallets, when properly used, enable candidates to securely share verified information directly with prospective employers. However, the growing prevalence of digital threats means these credentials have the potential to be misused, introducing new hiring risks if not properly validated.
Key takeaway: Verifying identity upfront helps strengthen the integrity of your hiring process.
Am I keeping up with regulatory changes?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, maintaining compliance with evolving regulations remains the top reason for screening candidates and employees, regardless of industry or region. But today’s regulatory landscape is far more challenging than yesterday’s. New laws are being passed to protect businesses, customers, and employees alike.
Some of the recent regulatory changes are:
- The Workplace Fairness Act, expected to be enacted next year or in 2027, protects employees from discrimination based on 11 “protected characteristics,”
- The Platform Workers Act, which took effect in January, placing ride-hailing drivers and freelance delivery workers in a distinct legal category and granting them greater protections,
- The Flexible Working Arrangement guidelines, encouraging employers to accommodate the changing expectations of employees and candidates in the way they work, such as flexibility regarding their work location, their preferred hours, and workload.
As regulations continue to evolve alongside the advancement of technology, businesses must adapt quickly. Partnering with a global leader in background screening programs can help manage your compliance requirements.
Does my program stop at the border, or does it follow the candidate’s history no matter where they’ve lived or worked?
In many cases, despite having an otherwise robust background screening program, an employer’s access to their candidates’ criminal and/or employment history may be limited to their country or region of operation. And while this might seem like a relatively insignificant oversight, particularly for companies in industries not subject to global screening regulations, not catching even one outside criminal record or international sanction can result in considerable financial and reputational damage, as well as potentially putting the rest of your workforce in harm’s way. There are opportunities to expand screening globally and have your full program consolidated with one screening provider.
Should I have an ongoing monitoring program?
While many organisations maintain a universal pre-employment screening policy for all candidates, the question of whether to continuously monitor or periodically rescreen existing employees can be more complicated. It’s necessary to establish a clear employee monitoring policy and guardrails that state legitimate business reasons for monitoring, what will be monitored, methods and tools used, and how often the screening should take place. In some cases, these decisions will be made based on contractual or regulatory obligations, but in others it will first require zeroing in on specific positions and classifying them based on a variety of potential risk factors, such as access to corporate finances, systems, or sensitive proprietary information.
How are my candidates experiencing the background check process?
Beyond protecting your business and workforce, background screening is also increasingly about offering optimal and even stand-out candidate experiences, which is why it’s so critical to seek feedback from new hires and make improvements wherever possible. Put simply, as competition for high-value candidates continues to increase, having a slow, unnecessarily invasive, and/or overly complicated screening process is an easy way to lose top talent to another organisation.
Is my decisional matrix aligned with our organisation’s needs and optimised to reduce our effort?
An organisation’s decisional matrix — i.e., specific criteria with which they analyse and make hiring decisions based on screening results — is essential to optimise your hiring and improve the efficiency of your screening and onboarding processes. However, in the absence of an automated, software-based system to help to apply their criteria based on these requirements, business and HR leaders run the risk of wasting valuable time, resources, and effort toward manually evaluating screening results and ensuring their decisions are in total alignment with their organisational needs and hiring standards.
Am I benchmarking against similarly sized industry leaders?
Finally, while it’s always crucial to understand and keep pace with industry trends, benchmarking your efforts against other industry leaders has become particularly important for optimising your screening program for everything from risk mitigation and compliance to efficiency and positive candidate experiences. Moreover, in today’s incredibly fast-paced and constantly evolving landscape, evaluating industry-relevant screening data allows organisations to not only keep pace with emerging trends, but also to identify new opportunities to stand out from the competition.
Interested in learning how you can optimize your background screening program? Click here to download your own copy of First Advantage’s Annual Screening Checklist.
