It doesn’t matter whether you’re a large multinational enterprise or you’re just looking for a new gardener to mow the lawn once a week—one of the most critical steps to take before offering anyone a contract is run a background check on them. Doing so can reveal criminal records, tax issues, court judgments, personal problems, bankruptcies, and more.
But which are the best background check sites on the web today? Keep reading to find out.
Intelius is arguably the leading name in the consumer sector. It can be used for hiring new employees, but it is also suitable to use on a personal basis (for example, if you’re trying to find an old classmate or friend).
All searches on Intelius are entirely private and confidential—the person you are searching for will never know that you were looking for them. From the searcher’s standpoint, that’s a massive boon, even if it is slightly unsettling to realize you might be on the receiving end of such a search one day.
In total, Intelius has more than 20 billion searchable records available. You can use the service to find public records, run criminal record checks, and check academic qualifications. It can even perform reverse phone number lookups, search email addresses, and find property data.
When you open a report, you will need to sign up for the premium plan. But you can try out a free background check with the trial plan; just make sure you cancel your account before the free period ends.
Universal Background Screening is specifically aimed at employers. The service is accredited by the Professional Background Screening Association (PBSA).
It relies on government and industry databases to find its records. That means you can uncover professional accreditation records as well as standard data such as criminal records, drug test records, and employment history. The drug test search covers more than 200 countries.
Unlike Intelius, Universal Background Screening does not provide instant results. It takes two days if you want a criminal record check and three days for verification checks.
If you work for a large organization that needs to use the service often, you’ll get a dedicated team and integrations with various human resources (HR) tools.
GoodHire is a competitor of Universal Background Screening. Like its rival, the service is focused on professional HR users. The company is Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)-verified.
Some of the searches that GoodHire can perform include criminal record checks, sex offender record checks, drug screening, education verification, employment verification, identity verification, driving record checks, credit checks, civil court checks, healthcare sanctions, and international background checks.
GoodHire specializes in six industries: Construction, healthcare, non-profit, retail, HR, and technology.
Candidates can also use the GoodHire service thanks to the Personal Background Check tool. The tool lets you add comments results that future employers will be able to see, fix mistakes and errors, and even download the report so you can share it with potential prospective employers in advance. Remember, if you are job hunting, make sure you’ve also made a stellar CV to go with your background check. There are lots of great online resume builders.
Employer plans start at $29.99, but you’ll need to pay the premium price of $79.99 if you want access to the full suite of searchable records.
If you’re a regular user rather than a business user, BeenVerified is the best background check site. The service is ideal for anyone who wants to self-search—you can monitor your public records and online reputation to make sure nothing errant slips through the net.
BeenVerified focuses on six main types of information:
- Contact information: Includes email addresses (personal and professional), phone numbers, and street addresses.
- Criminal and court records: You can uncover arrests, criminal records, traffic violations, and bankruptcies.
- Vehicle records: Search vehicle identification numbers (VINs), accident records, salvage records, car recalls, and license plate information.
- Caller ID: A reverse phone number lookup tool to discover who called you (includes names, locations, and spam reports).
- Property records: Find out about deeds, property values, and professional property assessments.
- Personal details: Any publicly available information such as births, deaths, and marriages, ages, relatives, assets, and education history.
Before you can see a report, you need to agree to a disclaimer that says you cannot use information from BeenVerified for “decisions about employment, insurance, tenant screening, consumer credit or any other purpose restricted by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) compliance.” Doing so could land you in trouble with the law.
TruthFinder doubles up on a lot of the features we’ve already discussed in other tools. It provides a way to search public records such as social media accounts, photos, police records, civil judgments, contact information, and more.
However, two features stand out that aren’t widely replicated by TruthFinder’s competitors.
The first unique feature is a dark web scanner; it will search the dark web to find instances of identity theft. As data breaches become more common, making sure your personal details aren’t being used for nefarious purposes is more important than ever. The scanner will look through bulletin boards, P2P file-sharing networks, forums, chat rooms, and web servers to find any potential issues.
The second standout feature is a family tree function. You can start to build out your family relationships through the free tool, and even automatically hunt down lost relatives using the built-in background searches.
(Note: Check out our dark web guide to learn more about what it is and its security problems.)
We end with another business tool, Employment Background Investigations (commonly referred to as EBI). The EBI tool specializes in industries that have compliance demand, with a specific focus on transportation, education, healthcare, hospitality, and retail.
It can perform background checks, I-9 and E-Verify scans, drug testing scans, and even occupational health scans. Basic identity checks are also included.
EBI is one of the few global background check sites. Although most online background check tools profess to offer worldwide scans, they are much more limited than the US-based searches. EIB can look into global records for employment, criminality, education, litigation, credit scores, driving records, and professional licenses.
While we understand the benefit of using background check service, reading this article will be enough to strike fear into the heart of privacy-conscious people.
To make sure your identity and personal information are as safe as possible, make sure you check out some of our other content on the topic. Click the link below to get started.