Background screening and verification providers

The last check before a start date, on degrees, past jobs, criminal records and identity

Back to you, and the job from Market Segments 12.4 and 12.6. You passed the test and the interview, and you have an offer. Before your start date, the company runs one last step, the check:

that your degree was really awarded
that your previous employer, or the company where you interned, really exists, and that you worked there
that your criminal record is clear
that you are who you say you are

This is called background screening. At heart, it is a services business: phone calls to universities, and searches of court records. But the companies that run it at scale run it on software platforms. Those platforms are built, in large part, in India, where much of the world's checking work is also done. The buyers are employers.

This Market Segment has four companies. Three are the American giants of the industry, with engineering centres in India. One is an Indian identity-verification company. And one company covered mainly in another Market Segment brings the Indian answer to the whole industry.

Two neighbours are covered elsewhere:

Checking a customer's identity, rather than an employee's, is covered in Market Segment 4.3, KYC, identity verification and fraud prevention (in Industry Vertical 4, Cybersecurity).
Indian firms that do the checking by hand are covered elsewhere. (More on them in the services-world collection.)

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

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What this section holds

What this section holds

Back to your offer from the start of this Market Segment. If the employer is a large American company, the check probably runs through one of three American screening companies. You upload your documents from your phone, and their platform does the rest, over several days.

First Advantage

with engineers in Bengaluru, has the most job postings of any company covered mainly in this Market Segment. It is the largest background-screening company in the world, and grew larger still when it bought Sterling in 2024. Its Bengaluru centre builds three things: the screening workflow, the candidate website through which you submit documents from a phone, and the identity check at the front of it.

HireRight

with engineers in Bengaluru, is its long-standing rival. It sells a screening API that plugs into the applicant tracking systems of Market Segment 12.4, Applicant tracking systems (ATS) and recruitment marketing. It also runs checks that follow a candidate across countries.

Accurate Background

with engineers in Hyderabad, is the third of the American screening companies. It runs criminal, credit and employment checks, and drug tests. It also collects, electronically, the form that proves a person may legally work in America.

Now suppose the employer is Indian. In India, much of the record is already digital. The government runs digital systems that anyone can build on, called digital public infrastructure: Aadhaar for identity, PAN for tax, and DigiLocker for documents such as degree certificates. A check that reads from them takes a minute, not days.

The American screening companies check scattered records by phone calls and court searches over several days, while a check that reads from Aadhaar, PAN and DigiLocker takes a minute.

OnGrid

from Gurugram, with engineers in Delhi, is the Indian company here. It sells an identity-verification API, and a background-check platform built on Aadhaar, PAN and DigiLocker. These make an Indian check faster and cheaper than the phone calls the American industry grew up on.

IDfy

with engineers in Mumbai and Bengaluru, has the most job postings in this Market Segment. Its identity-verification and KYC platform serves banks first. It is here for its background-check product for employers.

IDfy is covered mainly in Market Segment 4.3, KYC, identity verification and fraud prevention (in Industry Vertical 4, Cybersecurity), and OnGrid also appears there.

The check that takes a minute.

The American screening companies sell a process that takes days, because the records are scattered. The Indian companies sell one that takes a minute, because the records are already on digital systems. Other countries are now copying India's digital infrastructure. As they do, OnGrid's and IDfy's kind of product shows where the industry is heading.

So the check before your start date from the start of this Market Segment can take days or a minute. It depends on whether your records are scattered across offices, or already on India's digital systems.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What HR tech companies hire for.

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