2025 Global Trends Report: Do You Know Your Organization’s Criminal Risk Profile?

While First Advantage’s 2025 Global Trends Report reveals a variety of new and potentially consequential insights, one thing that hasn’t changed is the universal prioritization of criminal background checks, which continue to be an essential component of nearly every customer’s screening program, regardless of industry or region.

However, just because criminal background screening might seem like a relatively basic requirement, that doesn’t mean it can be done effectively using a generic, one-size-fits-all approach. On the contrary, criminal background check policies and procedures should not only be highly targeted and strategic, but also carefully aligned with your organization’s unique criminal risk profile.

In this blog, we’ll detail how to properly identify your organizational criminal risk profile, before explaining why aligning it with your screening policies is increasingly critical to improving risk management, reducing costs, and streamlining the overall candidate experience.

Identifying and Mapping Criminal Risks Across Your Organization

In simple terms, your organizational criminal risk profile represents your level of vulnerability to a wide range of potential criminal threats within your workforce. Whether it’s violence of any kind, financial crime, or theft of intellectual property (IP), being able to identify and proactively address these and other risks is crucial to putting together your overall plan for protecting both your employees and brand reputation, as well as helping to support compliance with relevant local and international regulations.

Importantly, criminal risk profiles often vary considerably depending on factors like industry, geographical location, regulatory obligations, and even employee demographics and the specific types of roles within your workforce. And in addition to performing a thorough risk assessment based on these key variables, accurately determining your exposure will require a more in-depth, cross-functional review and analysis of all relevant historical data, as well as existing operational processes and policies across the organization.

For example, in most cases, there may be areas of your operation particularly susceptible to bad actors looking to inflict financial or reputational damage on the company. For this reason, whether we’re talking about an established employee or potential new hire, it makes sense to apply an additional level of scrutiny when evaluating roles that require access to corporate finances and sensitive and/or proprietary information.

Additionally, very few businesses have a perfect track record when it comes to preventing adverse events or outright criminality in the workplace. However, by taking the time to review and analyze historical data related to prior incidents, while being sure to involve and seek the feedback of all relevant and trusted stakeholders across the risk landscape, it allows you to more accurately determine whether such behavior has been entirely isolated, or if it may indicate a pattern and reveal previously unrecognized pain points.

In short, taking the steps needed to determine your criminal risk profile not only allows you to identify and better understand your unique vulnerabilities, but also provides a comprehensive roadmap for implementing a targeted, strategic criminal background check strategy to more effectively mitigate the most immediate and potentially damaging threats facing your organization.

Emerging Trends Highlight the Importance of Aligning Screening Policies With Organizational Risks

While aligning your organization’s risk profile and background check policies has always been a smart approach, it’s arguably more important than ever given a variety of new and ongoing trends around reportable records, criminality, and rapidly advancing technology, all of which are having a growing impact on modern screening capabilities and best practices.

For example, our global trends report reveals the proportion of criminal records uncovered by screening processes is decreasing, a mostly unsurprising trend that seems to correspond with a broader decline in global crime rates. But at the same time, we also see a curious dichotomy emerging when looking at data around the severity of crimes. More specifically, while studies from Pew Research have shown a significant dip in US violent and property crime rates since the 1990s, First Advantage has witnessed a notable increase in job-seeking individuals with reportable records of violence and threats when compared to other categories.

However, it’s not just that the threat of violent actors may be more pronounced than employers expect. Sex offender searches have also increased by 20% since 2022. Additionally, factors like limited access to court records, applicants with multiple aliases, and the rise in digital identity fraud have made it more challenging to navigate unclear search results and to report inaccuracies.

Since many background searches yield no reportable results, some employers may be tempted to rollback critical screening initiatives, while others may ramp up their efforts to offset the complexity, often wasting valuable time and resources over-screening employees and candidates in low-risk positions.

The trick here is to strike an appropriate balance between ensuring thorough vetting and not degrading the candidate experience with arduous screening policies. After all, in today’s competitive market, valuable candidates are simply becoming less likely to tolerate inefficient background screening and onboarding processes.

Overall, as employers across the board today continue to view criminal record results as a major determinant in their hiring process, many will need to determine the factors contributing to their specific risk profile and revisit their background screening policies to more effectively manage evolving risks.

By taking the time to align your criminal background check processes with your unique organizational risk profile, you can begin to implement a robust, yet highly targeted strategy grounded in data-driven decision-making, resulting not only in reduced costs and liability, but also a screening process designed specifically to address the needs of both your organization and the candidate.

Want to learn more about the state of global screening, and how these latest trends could impact your organization’s background check policies and priorities? Download First Advantage’s 2025 Global Trends Report today.