Employee background check services, employee screening services and employment screening services: what each provider publishes

What each provider publishes about its own price

How to specify an employee screening programme before you ask for prices

1. Write down the roles, not the searches. A warehouse hire, a driver and a finance controller need different reports. Providers will sell you one package for everyone, which either over-searches the warehouse hire or under-searches the controller. Group your roles first and price a package per group.
2. Count the counties, because that is the bill. Criminal records in the United States mostly live at county level. A candidate who has lived in three counties in seven years is three separate searches, each with its own access fee, and that arithmetic drives the per-check price far more than the provider's brand does.
3. Decide what you will do about verifications. Employment and education verification is manual work at somebody's end, priced per verification and slower than a criminal search. Deciding up front whether you verify the last employer or the last three changes both the price and the turnaround you should expect.
4. Agree the adverse action workflow before you sign. Ask each provider to show you the pre-adverse notice, the copy of the report and summary of rights the candidate receives, the waiting period it enforces and the final notice. The duty is yours, but the workflow is theirs, and they differ a lot.

The three things an employee screening service sells

The first is search: running a criminal history, a driving record, a sex offender registry check or a database sweep and returning what was found. The second is verification: phoning an employer or a registrar to confirm what the candidate claimed. The third is process: the disclosure and authorisation forms, the candidate portal, the adverse action letters and the audit trail behind them.

Those three have completely different cost structures. Search is largely court and data access fees plus margin. Verification is labour and is the slow part of almost every delayed report. Process is software, which is why the providers with the strongest compliance workflow tend to be the ones selling annual subscriptions rather than per-check rates.

What an entry package usually searches

The advertised entry tiers on this site sit at $29.99 a check for GoodHire's Basic and $29.99 a report for Checkr's cheapest tier. What that typically buys is a national criminal database sweep, a sex offender registry search, and one county criminal search, plus identity and address history to tell the provider which counties to look in.

The national database is a pointer, not an answer. It is assembled from sources that update at different speeds and it is not a comprehensive federal index of convictions. Reputable providers treat a database hit as a lead and confirm it at the county court before reporting it, which is both the right thing under the FCRA's accuracy standard and the reason a report with a hit takes longer than a clear one.

Where the quoted price and the real price part company

Three things usually sit outside the headline: additional county searches, verifications, and anything drug or driving related. A ten dollar per county add-on is invisible on a comparison chart and material on a candidate who has moved twice.

Ask each provider for a worked example rather than a rate card: one candidate, three counties in seven years, two employment verifications, a motor vehicle record. The number that comes back is comparable across providers in a way the entry price is not, and it is the number your finance team will recognise when the first invoice arrives.

Questions buyers ask before they order

What do employee background check services cost per hire?

The five providers on this site that publish a rate advertise entry packages from $29.00 to $39.99, median $29.99. Real per-hire cost is usually higher because of extra county searches and verifications, and most of the market publishes nothing and quotes on volume.

How long does an employee background check take?

A clear database and single-county criminal search is often back within one to three business days. Employment and education verifications are the common delay because they depend on somebody at the other end answering, and a county court that requires an in-person clerk search takes longer again.

Can I run the check before I make an offer?

It depends where you are. A growing number of states and cities require a conditional offer before you may ask about or look into criminal history, and California's Fair Chance Act is the strictest widely applicable example. Your provider will not police this for you.

Do I need written permission from the candidate?

Yes. The FCRA requires a clear standalone written disclosure that a consumer report may be obtained for employment purposes, and the candidate's written authorisation, before the report is ordered. Burying that disclosure in an application form is the single most litigated mistake in employment screening.

Screening rules by state