Checkr Review - Is It a Good Fit for Your Company?

This Checkr review will provide you with complete insight into this AI-powered background check service. Companies of all sizes use it to screen their potential employees.

Checkr has been around since 2014, with its headquarters located in San Francisco, California, and Denver, Colorado.

But is the service all it’s been hyped up to be? Keep reading this Checkr review and you’ll find out. Let’s dive in.

Features

According to its website, Checkr manages 97% report accuracy and takes less than 15 minutes to complete checks 84% of the time. But what can the platform do?

1. Applicant Tracking

This is an excellent feature for HRs. Checkr has established a wide range of partnerships with the best HR, ATS, and onboarding systems.

Its use of ATS makes it easy to navigate the large employment pool with tons of applications from job seekers.

With this, the employer or recruiter can cut down on the time spent manually going through resumes.

You can set up an automated filter based on selected keywords, skills, educational background (schools attended and degrees awarded), years of experience, and former employers.

Using this feature cuts down on human bias or preference, gets applications from only eligible candidates, and eventually hires the best candidate for the job.

2. Criminal Record Verification

Checkr’s criminal records check feature pulls data from a lot of sources to help employers assess their potential employees’ history of crime.

These sources include global crime watchlists, federal, state, and country criminal record databases.

Therefore, you can screen job candidates for traffic infractions and violations, felony criminal convictions, and sex offender lists all from one dashboard.

This is an effective tool to ascertain the risks attached to hiring a candidate and also comply with employee integrity standards in various work industries.

3. Employment Verification Checks

With Checkr’s employment verification feature, you can quickly see your candidates’ work history and verify their level of experience. This includes information such as previous job titles, dates of employment, and other important data.

This feature is especially useful to disqualify ineligible job seekers with false records.

4. Motor Vehicle Reports & Driving Records Check

This MVR & driving records check feature is useful to ascertain your candidates’ driving experience and road safety.

Within a few minutes, you can get information such as their driving safety records, license status, and eligibility to drive on international roads.

Companies like Uber and Doordash find this feature helpful as it helps them comply with federal safety regulations and ensure the safety of their customers and the public.

5. Credit Background Checks

Before hiring for a role that requires a significant level of financial responsibility, it’s important to run a credit background check on potential employees.

With this feature, you’ll get information such as credit-to-debt ratio, loan history, liabilities, charge-offs, tax liens, repayment history, and bankruptcies.

6. Pre-employment Drug Testing

Checkr’s pre-employment drug testing feature helps you to identify and avoid hiring people with addiction problems and promotes safety at work.

With a network of over 6,100 clinics spread across the US, candidates can walk into a Checkr facility in their proximity to get tested.

The platform also offers on-site drug testing as well as routine drug testing of staff to help maintain drug-free workplace policies. This is a feature you probably won’t get with many other background check sites.

7. Pre-employment Health Screening

This feature helps recruiters to ensure that they only hire candidates with optimum physical, emotional, and mental health for available job roles.

As a result, companies can promote the productivity of their employees and workplace health.

8. Education Verification Checks

Checkr’s education verification check helps recruiters to confirm their candidate’s highest educational qualification, enrollment and attendance dates, graduation dates, and other details.

9. International Background Checks

Checkr’s international background check feature will help you maintain a uniform hiring standard for your candidates.

With this feature, you can get information such as education history, employment records, and criminal records from 200+ countries.

10. Civil Background Checks

This civil background check is important to discover a candidate’s legal record apart from criminal activities.

This check shows all legal cases where the candidate is the respondent. This may include lawsuits, tax disputes, harassment claims, debt collection suits, contract breaches, etc.

11. Professional Reference Checks

This feature helps recruiters to verify the authenticity of their potential employees’ references and previous job performances.

It will also provide deeper insights into the candidate’s work culture, relationship with past employees, strengths and weaknesses, soft skills, and ability to work with others.

12. Healthcare Sanction Checks

Companies hiring for healthcare roles use this feature to check their candidates’ eligibility to practice in the roles they’re hiring for.

With a simple check, you can get anyone’s history of disciplinary actions, license status, debarments, sanctions, and exclusions.

It helps to avoid professionals with sanctions that may lead to punishments from regulatory authorities.

13. Professional License Verification

Professional license checks help to verify that candidates hold valid licenses that make them qualified for the roles they’re applying for.

The feature makes it easy to get information about anyone’s license status, certification name, licensing authorities, and its validity.

14. Continuous Checks

This feature allows employers to monitor any changes in their employees’ background and criminal history.

It provides real-time updates about any employee’s criminal record changes, civil records, driving records, credit records, and more.

All this information helps to ensure that employees maintain lawful lifestyles that would pose no risk to the business or its customers.

15. Activity Dashboard

Checkr has a centralized activity dashboard that shows the status of the background checks performed for every candidate. This status is indicated by a color scheme.

It includes real-time audit logs, estimated report completion time, third-party testing, information encryption, and lots more.

Also, the dashboard can help you manage your candidate pool, manually order background checks and reports, and analyze your productivity.

Ease of Use

During my research for this Checkr review, I found that it streamlined its services for legal and US-registered businesses. Therefore, I couldn’t register to test the platform’s capabilities sufficiently.

You’ll need to have a real business with US tax identification, a verifiable address, and a USA credit/debit card to sign up on the website.

However, from interacting with the free sections of the website, I’m impressed with the fluidity, the intuitive user interface, and the amount of information on every page.

Lastly, the platform allows you to reach a responsive customer support team via email, phone, and chat.

Pricing

Checkr offers a few subscription plans tailored to meet the needs of every business at every level:

• Basic+ ($29.99 per check) – Offers access to features like SSN Trace, Global Watchlist Records, Sex Offender Registries, and National Criminal Records.

• Essential ($54.99 per check) – Grants access to all the benefits of the Basic+ plan plus a 7-year County Criminal Records search, and in-depth Motor Vehicle Records search (essential for driving roles).

• Professional ($ 79.99) – Offers access to all the benefits included in the Essential subscription plan plus Federal Criminal Records searches, Employment Verification Checks, and Education Verification checks.

Note: Besides these subscription plans, you may need to pay additional charges as third-party passthrough fees. These fees are required by states, DMVs, or county courts for them to grant access to their records. These passthrough fees, however, vary based on state, county, or province.

You may also be interested in:

• InfoTracer Review
• US Search Review

Verdict

Judging by the price you have to pay per check, Checkr is an expensive background check platform but with the features it offers, it provides value for money.

Its flexible pricing allows companies and business owners to choose a plan that best suits their budget and candidate information requirements.

Moreover, its additional passthrough fees make it transparent as you get to know what you’re paying extra fees for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Checkr background check legit?

Yes, Checkr offers a legit background check service. This is due to its use of modern-day technologies and its partnership with a series of ATS and other software.

It also sends a notice of background checks to job applicants through email and phone, for them to input. As long as the required information is properly filled in, the result of the background check is accurate.

Is Checkr secure?

Yes, Checkr is secure as it’s Privacy Shield certified. It uses a form of encryption that makes all the information transmitted on the website secure and inaccessible to third parties.

What kind of background check does Checkr do?

Checkr offers background checks that include:

• Employment verification
• Credit checks
• Education verification
• Criminal history checks
• Driving record checks
• Civil court checks
• Reference checks
• Drug and health testing.

What companies use Checkr?

More than 3000 companies use Checkr. Most of them are US-based and related to Computer software.

The following are a few of the notable companies that use Checkr:

• Home Depot Inc
• Infosys Ltd
• TaskRabbit
• Netflix
• GrubHub
• Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp
• Confidential Records
• Uber
• Doordash
• Zenefits
• Instacart.

For more information about the service, check out the rest of my Checkr review.