What Are The Best Background Check Sites In 2020?

HR.com, a social network website for Human Resources professionals, teamed up with the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (NAPBS) to publish an industry survey on background screening. The findings tell us, to little surprise, that background screenings have become an integral function of the business world. A few statistics:

• 96% of all employers conduct some form of background check
• 51% of employers say they conduct screenings to improve hire quality
• 85% say screening is necessary to protect employees or customers
• Over 80% of employees are screened for criminal records

So this tells us that all new job applicants should expect a background check as part of the application process. But background checks aren't just for employment. They're increasingly used by landlords, clients on Airbnb, or even dates on Tinder to check up on their new match. Reflexively, individuals even screen themselves to find out how their credit report will fare in a loan application.

CheckPeople.com
The most popular and complete one-stop source for background checks of every need, CheckPeople.com sifts through all available public records and credit agencies. Their service includes employment screening, reverse phone number look-up, identity verification, credit checks, and more. They allow unlimited searches for a base monthly fee after a sign-up. For professionals who are willing to pay for the first-class service, this is their likely best option.

USA.gov
An often overlooked option for the truly thrifty. Any paid background check service will usually access public records, which is exactly what USA.gov will tell you how to do, broken down into individual steps. The downside of this is that tracing through our government's labyrinthine bureaucracy is a tedious process that is inefficient to do for bulk processing. But for a one-time search or the occasional informal query, it's free of charge if you've got the extra time.

TruePeopleSearch
For a free option, TruePeopleSearch is as good as the digital equivalent of thumbing through all the White Pages of all the counties in the country. However, it is not fit for professional employment screenings, as it just finds the address and phone information. Still, it's a starting point to narrow down your continued searches through other means.

Classmates.com
Most employers will want to verify educational credits anyway, which is exactly the kind of field Classmates.com specializes in. Why settle for merely confirming a degree, when you can find the teachers and classmates from the year your candidate attended? This is a more thorough look into an academic record, for those positions where educational qualifications are crucial to the position.

Google Groups
Are you looking for somebody from an older generation? Google Groups may come through when normal social media searches fail, as it checks message boards active since the 1990s when Usenet and dial-up modems were the standards. This is better than just vanilla Googling.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become the eCommerce world's virtual business card. Unlike other social networks, you won't find a lot of idle chatter here. LinkedIn lists people by profession, with networks of co-workers and associates. It's a perfect way to verify employment records, in the same way, that Classmates are useful for ascertaining education.

SocialMention
Have you ever longed for a meta-search engine just for social media? Social Mention is a dual-purpose site. It's aimed mostly at finding buzzed topics that are hot on Twitter, Instagram, and the like. But it's also useful for finding people by name, provided they're active on social media. Which nowadays is nearly everyone.

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