Checkr vs. HireRight: Who Wins the Race for Efficient Background Checks?

From talent shortages to increasingly complex compliance regulations, today’s hiring professionals are under pressure. If tight hiring timelines have you and your team feeling overwhelmed, burned out, and stressed, using HireRight as your background check provider could be part of the problem.

Checkr’s customer reviews, net promoter score (NPS) of +60, and industry-leading G2 ratings tell the real story: Checkr consistently outperforms HireRight when it comes to speed, efficiency, accuracy, and customer support.

Are you starting to wonder whether HireRight’s shortcomings are hindering your hiring efforts? Dig into the following comparison of HireRight and Checkr—and discover why switching to Checkr could be the antidote to your background check headaches.

Speeding up the hiring process is the top priority for many TA professionals, which means the ability to order, create, and adjudicate background check reports quickly is essential. When selecting the best background check provider, consider the following factors.

You may face some serious stumbling blocks right out of the gate when you use HireRight. It’s difficult to understand what you’re ordering or to make package changes. You can’t select, configure, change, or review packages within the HireRight UI, for example. When you do make a package change, users say HireRight typically requires 10-12 business days for their customer support team to process it.

In addition, after you change a package, some users report that HireRight’s system automatically resets the package's county criminal search to include a maximum of one county. If you don’t catch this reset, you might not realize you’re searching only one county per candidate—an omission that can result in criminal background checks that are less thorough than you intend them to be.

Checkr’s background check packages smooth your path to successful background screening from the start. You can easily customize packages to meet your industry’s requirements and your organization’s policies, such as adding MVR checks for driver roles or Fraud Abuse Control Information System (FACIS) searches for healthcare positions.

Your business probably doesn’t operate from 9 to 5 anymore, so why would you choose a background check provider that does? HireRight only processes background check orders during business hours. Adding to the delays, HireRight suffers from slow turnaround times (TATs) and inconsistency across jurisdictions.

You’re left playing a guessing game as to when your HireRight background checks will complete, scrambling to adjust hiring timelines, and struggling to keep candidates engaged as screenings drag on.

Checkr’s modern background screenings use AI and automation to deliver reports rapidly. Checks move fast from the moment you place an order—whether that’s during business hours or not. Recent benchmarking studies show Checkr’s median turnaround time (TAT) is 1.75x faster than HireRight’s, and 97% of customers say Checkr’s TAT is faster than the competition’s.

The Checkr Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) feature uses machine learning and court data to accurately predict background screening TATs. That means you, your candidates, and your hiring managers always know where things stand.

How does Checkr deliver such fast TATs? Checkr owns most of the data sources used in background checks—including the data sources most competitors rely on—ensuring direct access to real-time data that competitors don’t have.

Checkr has also built extensive partnerships with court researchers, so civil and criminal record search results are returned rapidly, without letting hurdles like date of birth (DOB) redactions slow reporting down. 

At best, incomplete background check reports waste time, requiring additional screenings to gather complete data. At worst, they result in non-compliant hiring choices and higher organizational risk.

HireRight lacks direct access points to certain data, which can lead to incomplete or less reliable search results. Checkr’s unique, direct access to data delivers more comprehensive checks, revealing records that other background check providers miss.

In fact, recent studies found that Checkr has a 13% higher hit rate than HireRight, with hit rate defined as the number of reports with at least one criminal charge found. It’s proof that you don’t have to sacrifice accuracy for speed.

Source: Checkr, Unlocking HR’s Strategic Potential Report

Does your TA team spend hours deciphering background check reports, laboring over adjudications, and manually managing adverse actions? Struggling to interpret complex information adds to your stress levels, and potential compliance errors could be costly.

HireRight’s lack of context around criminal charges can complicate decision-making, and you can’t ask candidates for context around their records in the user interface (UI), so you’ll have to take time-consuming extra steps. Taking advantage of HireRight’s adjudication services and adverse action communications requires paying extra or purchasing a la carte services—an increase in costs you may not want to shoulder.

Every Checkr package includes the Assess automated adjudication feature, which is available in multiple tiers to fit your organization’s needs. This feature eliminates adjudication headaches with an intuitive dashboard and detailed, color-coded reports that are easy to understand. Plus, you can easily contact candidates to request context around criminal records directly from your Checkr dashboard, saving time. 

Checkr’s AI-powered adjudication filters and automations help ensure consistent, compliant hiring decisions. Thanks to Checkr’s efficient, automated workflows, customers report they’re able to reallocate up to 75% of adjudication resources to other tasks.

Slogging through tedious manual processes and unnecessary steps is frustrating and inefficient. A background check solution that’s easy to learn and use saves your team time, helping you hire faster. Here are some things to think about when you weigh HireRight against Checkr.

When you switch to a new background check provider, you’re eager to get started right away. Onboarding with HireRight can be tedious, though, with the process frequently bogged down by redundant communication and prolonged verification steps.

In contrast, users can typically complete their online Checkr account setup and business verification in a matter of minutes. Over one-quarter of Checkr customers (28%) enjoy a go-live time of less than one day, according to data from G2, and over three-quarters (76%) report a go-live time of under one month.

Plus, Checkr has a dedicated implementation team for organizations hiring at scale that combines deep background check expertise with software implementation experience to help you maximize Checkr's capabilities and make a seamless switch.

A clunky user interface requiring extra steps or workarounds can really slow you down. HireRight’s UI is outdated and unintuitive. For example, each new action generates a new sub-tab in the dashboard, and users say they can’t easily revisit previous screens. Instead, users report being forced to manually close tabs and reopen sections via the sidebar, adding unnecessary steps to the background screening process. When you review the results of a county criminal search, HireRight doesn't let you inspect why each county was included in the search.

Checkr’s modern, intuitive user dashboard minimizes your team’s learning curve, with easy navigation that streamlines your daily workflows. You’ll see clear explanations of charges and felonies with detailed insights into county-level searches. With a single click, adjudicators can see an overview of a charge, along with its severity and jurisdictional context.

When you have questions or need help with your background check solution, getting fast, reliable assistance from the customer support team can keep things running smoothly. But HireRight’s customer support can be chaotic and inefficient, with some users reporting broken phone lines, long response times, and conflicting responses when they finally get hold of the support team.

Having a dedicated account manager helps you get the most from your background screening solution and saves you time, since you don’t have to explain your needs anew every time you call support. At HireRight, however, only customers with revenue over $400K annually receive support from dedicated account managers. Customers with revenue under $400K must make do with pooled account management, which can be a frustrating and time-consuming way to get assistance.

Checkr’s customer support team is available 24/7, minimizing back-and-forth, and offers responsive support and proactive guidance in compliance issues. Checkr also provides a robust Help Center and educational resources. Customers rate Checkr’s quality of support higher than HireRight’s on G2.

Managing background check costs is crucial to optimizing your hiring budget. Unforeseen expenses can drive up your cost-per-hire and keep you from reaching your desired KPIs. But unexpected fees are a common problem for HireRight customers. 

Over 99% of fees in HireRight’s contract “Schedule of Fees” may be modified during implementation to include changing package scope, adding new services, and adding ancillary services like adjudication and adverse action letters. You may be sold a “lower scope” HireRight contract that seems to be firmly within your budget, only to realize later that essential services like SSN trace with developed alias, adjudication features, and adverse action letters aren’t included, but billed as extras after your contract is signed. 

Be sure to consider your background screening solution’s maintenance costs, too.  HireRight’s enterprise customers may be subject to a tiered “tech package” maintenance/platform fee. That means you could face extra charges for services such as account changes, customer consents, credentialing, IP whitelisting, security certificate updates, SSO and datafeed support, and integration workflow support. Enterprise customers seeking custom analytics from HireRight may be charged extra as well.

Checkr, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive analytics platform designed for enterprises as part of the package. Intuitive analytics tools help you identify bottlenecks, analyze key metrics, and filter and customize reports. You’ll gain deeper insights into your hiring workflows to drive data-based decisions.

When you’re looking for a background check solution, real customers’ opinions and experiences are an invaluable guide. For example, a company’s net promoter score (NPS) is a trusted indicator of how customers feel about the company. Scores above 50 are considered excellent. Checkr’s NPS is +60, which is our highest to date (up from an NPS of 55 last year) and well above the B2B technology industry average of 36. In comparison, HireRight’s NPS has been reported as -2 for the past two years.

Checkr’s customer satisfaction is also reflected in our status as a G2 “Leader” for the fifth year running, based on verified user reviews. We were also named Market Leader in G2’s background check category.

Choosing a dedicated, modern background check partner can deliver the speed and efficiency your company needs to hire successfully at scale. With AI-powered screening technology, workflow automations, an easy-to-use dashboard, and more than 100 ATS integrations, Checkr helps streamline your hiring process and save your HR team time.

If you’re not happy with HireRight, maybe it’s time for you to join the more than 100,000 satisfied customers who rely on Checkr to help them hire quickly and confidently.   

About the author

As VP of Product & Customer Marketing at Checkr, Bryan is responsible for educating current and prospective customers about the value and use of our products. He is passionate about understanding the needs of companies and candidates who use Checkr, and helping them get the most from the platform.