Make Accuracy-First Background Screening Your Strategic Edge
With regulations tightening across industries and regions, accuracy-first background screening is essential. By prioritizing accuracy, organizations can reduce compliance risks, ensure consistency, and make more confident hiring decisions.
In an increasingly complex and competitive hiring landscape, accuracy in background screening plays a critical role. It can be the difference between making a confident hiring decision and introducing unnecessary risk. Between earning candidate trust and undermining your employer brand. Between scaling with control—or losing it.
But while speed, automation, and candidate experience often dominate conversations around background screening, accuracy remains the unsung driver behind them all. It’s not just a checkbox or KPI. Accuracy forms an important foundation for stronger hiring outcomes—from compliance to onboarding to long-term strategic workforce planning.
HireRight’s 2025 Global Benchmark Report revealed that accuracy of results is the most cited priority globally when choosing a screening provider. In North America, 74% of respondents cite it as one of the most important factors; up from 49% in 2023.
This is the mindset shift forward-thinking organizations are starting to embrace. Accuracy-first background screening isn’t just another step in the hiring process. It’s a lever for strategic advantage.
For too long, many organizations have treated background screening as a transactional task, or a means to an end. Something to be completed and ideally accelerated. But today, the stakes are higher. Many legal frameworks are tightening. Candidates are more selective. And global operations demand more nuance than one-size-fits-all solutions—since risks, regulations, and cultural expectations can vary significantly across markets.
Accuracy-first screening can reframe background checks as a tool not just for compliance, but for strategic alignment with broader talent strategy and business goals. It’s one way hiring leaders, compliance officers, and TA teams can help to ensure that hiring decisions are built on solid ground—globally, and at speed.
Accuracy is the thread that helps to support and connect:
Compliance-focused global screening programs
In highly regulated sectors—such as financial services to healthcare—compliance is both critical and complex. Local labor laws, data privacy requirements, and fair hiring regulations differ across markets. Gaps in screening processes may contribute to compliance risks, including regulatory inquriie or legal challenges under frameworks such as the GDPR or U.S. anti-discrimination laws.
Too often, organizations reactively address compliance failures; chasing issues after they arise. But accuracy-first screening can help to move compliance from a reactive necessity towards a more proactive approach.
With the right infrastructure, accuracy can support consistency across the organization and across regions; contributing to a compliance posture and culture that scales. It can help to reduce blind spots before they create downstream cost, risk, or delay.
Screening with urgency and integrity
The pressure to move fast and reduce time-to-hire is constant—especially for talent acquisition and HR teams working in high-volume or time-sensitive environments. But speed without rigor may lead to bad hires, costly rework, and increased attrition.
The solution isn’t choosing between speed and accuracy. It’s working towards both—by building processes that deliver reliable information fast.
“You can’t afford for background screening to slow you down. But you can’t afford to rush it either.” Peter Cleverton, EVP of International at HireRight.
Accuracy-first screening helps to make this possible. Because when screening is done comprehensively and in alignment with best practices, the quick answer is likely the right one.
A candidate experience that motivates, not frustrates
Candidate experience is often overlooked in the context of background screening—but it shouldn’t be. A poor or opaque process can frustrate top talent, create unnecessary drop-off, and erode trust right around the offer stage.
In contrast, prioritizing accuracy also means prioritizing your candidates. It supports more thorough results, helps reduce errors, and promotes a process that feels fair and transparent. It can turn a traditionally painful step into one that builds trust and re-inforces your employer brand.
“Accuracy-first background screening turns a routine task into a powerful differentiator.” Ann Losiewski, EVP of the Americas at HireRight.
With more than half of candidates reporting that they have declined a job offer due to a poor experience (CareerPlug, 2024 Candidate Experience Report); accuracy-first design can support a more positive impression before day one.
The value of accuracy
The value of accuracy extends beyond risk mitigation. It can play a key role in supporting better business outcomes, such as improved time-to-hire, reduced drop-off and turnover, stronger candidate pipelines, and more resilient teams.
Across industries and regions, organizations that prioritize accuracy-first background screening are better positioned to reduce hiring risks and get talent right (not just talent right now).
That’s why, at HireRight, accuracy isn’t just our priority. It’s our red line.
Ready to make accuracy-first background screening your strategic edge? Download Get Talent Right.
Release Date: August 21, 2025
HireRight
HireRight is a leading provider of on-demand employment background checks, drug and health screening, and electronic Form I-9 and E-Verify solutions that help employers automate, manage and control background screening and related programs.