Where to Integrate Background Checks Into Your Platform

In our post, When Should You Integrate Background Checks Into Your Platform, we talked through the ideal time to integrate background checks based on your company’s growth and timeline. Are you just starting out and haven’t launched a product yet? Are you fairly established and ready to streamline your user experience and processes? While there are pros and cons to each, one thing remains the same: A background check API can make background checks feel like a natural extension of your product and overall user experience. 

It’s important to take the time to consider and understand exactly where background checks best fit into your product. We’ll cover a few examples to get you started.

Where can background checks fit into my product? 

For gig, on-demand, and two-sided marketplaces—where service providers will directly interface with the customer through driving, delivery, in-home visits, care, etc., background checks can be made part of the user sign-up and onboarding process. 

In order to run a background check, you’ll typically need to collect basic information about the users. You can design your onboarding flow to allow users to easily input that information so you can use it to request the background check. As the background check is being run, you can share progress updates directly in the platform. For example, if these users have an account profile, they can log in and see the status of their background check.

Tülogy, a platform that connects customers with home-repair professionals, designed a user onboarding flow with these considerations in mind. According to Vladimir Vezikov, CEO and co-founder of Tülogy, “Checkr is integrated into the registration process. When professionals register, they submit some basic information about themselves and their company, and then are prompted and encouraged to complete a background check. Professionals submit their information to Checkr and their results automatically correspond to an indicator on their profile.”

In these gig, on-demand, and two-sided marketplaces, there is always an end user receiving the goods or services of your company. They aren’t the people getting the background checks run on them, but they benefit from knowing if a background check has been completed on the person they are interacting with from your company. 

Companies can offer this peace of mind and transparency through an indicator or signifier in the platform. For example, if you’ve ever used an app or platform for hiring childcare, there is usually a badge on the person’s profile to indicate that they’ve passed their background check and thus, are approved to be on the app and to be hired to care for children. Additionally, you can use different badges or indicators to designate between the types of background checks the person has passed. For example, if your app or platform offers a driving service, a user can have a unique badge to indicate they’ve passed both a criminal check and a motor vehicle record check. 

For Tülogy, “On the customer side, they see the background check status of every pro they interact with. Whether they’re assessing incoming messages, bids, or looking at a pro’s profile, we provide that transparency for them.”

This example depends on how many teams in your company work with the background check process. Background check providers, like Checkr, offer a dashboard where internal users can log in and view background check related information, but what if you wanted to design processes across various teams that didn’t require logging into the dashboard? 

For example, if you have an internal review system, you can use a background check API to create an escalation depending on the background check result to notify the right team to proactively address the escalation. It saves time by automating what would have been a manual process, and allows internal users to engage with the background check process where they already work.

While we introduced some examples of how background checks can be incorporated into your platform, the possibilities are in your hands as you design what works best for your company and product to provide a seamless and integrated experience.

Ready to implement background checks into your platform? Talk to our sales team today.