Gain a Competitive Edge Using Our Annual Screening Review Checklist

Collaborate is First Advantage’s annual flagship conference dedicated to background screening for our valued customers, partners, and invited guests. At this April’s event, we released our annual 2025 Global Trends Report, revealing momentous trends in background check speed, global screening, and risk management. 

But the real question is: how can your organization best leverage these insights? 

That’s why we recommend your organization 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, criminal 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 optimize candidate experiences and secure top talent in today’s highly competitive market.  

Should I verify a candidate’s identity before a background check? 

Incorporating an identity check early in the hiring process, before a background check, helps flag inaccurate candidate data that can potentially go undetected and result in relevant records not being reported in a background check. There is a wide variety of identity-first screening solutions available today, which are not only surprisingly easy to implement but also increasingly important from a risk management perspective. In fact, the FTC reports that instances of identity fraud have almost tripled in the past decade, while demand for our identity-first solutions has grown by over 500% since 2022, suggesting a substantial rise in both the prevalence of threats and targeted efforts to combat them across industries and globally.  

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. However, today’s regulatory landscape is nothing like it used to be, with federal and local requirements in a state of near-constant evolution and an overall landscape that continues to grow in complexity alongside the advancement of technology. Whether it relates to emerging clean slate laws impacting criminal record searches or new guidelines around fair chance, having a screening program that supports compliance requirements requires more vigilance and thoughtfulness than ever before.  

Depending on where I’m screening, is my drug screening program on par with my peers who are adopting oral screening? 

Drug screening trends are also shifting rapidly in today’s environment, in terms of both objectives and methods of administration. In addition to more businesses excluding marijuana from their drug screens as a result of evolving laws and subsequent changes to employer policies, oral-based screening is becoming increasingly popular due to its enhanced convenience and effectiveness in detecting recent drug use. In fact, First Advantage’s research revealed the proportion of US oral-based screens surged by 58% year-over-year in 2024, and more than half of our survey respondents said they use or will use oral-based drug screening in the future, citing benefits such as easy applicant self-administration, near-instant negative results, and overall reliability.  

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 organizations 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 organization.  

Is my decisional matrix aligned with our organization’s needs and optimized to reduce our effort? 

An organization’s decisional matrix — i.e., specific criteria with which they analyze and make hiring decisions based on screening results — is essential to optimize 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 organizational 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 optimizing 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 organizations 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.