Activus stopped 60 impersonators from starting on Day 1 with Checkr

Dawn Nash, Director of Recruiting and Enculturation at Activus Connect, runs recruiting for a company that hires people it will rarely meet face-to-face. That's the nature of the business: Activus hires almost entirely remotely, staffing customer service, back-office, and chat roles for clients across healthcare, technology, and luxury retail.

For a while, her team sensed something was off. A candidate would apply, interview, and pass every step, and then someone different would show up for new-hire orientation.

"We were having people apply somewhere in the process for someone else, and it was just growing and growing, and we could not get in front of it," Dawn said. Her team pulled recorded interviews and I-9 paperwork and confirmed it: the person on day one wasn't the person who'd been hired. In one case, they found four different people attached to a single identity, and one of them even made it to work after passing a background check. 

By the time Activus brought the problem to Checkr, the season’s count had passed 60—roughly two full training classes of people who had lied about who they were—underscoring the scale of the fraud pattern Checkr was already seeing and working to solve. “This was not unique to us,” Dawn said. “It was starting to become more of a global issue.”

Before Checkr rolled out identity verification, Activus tried to solve the issue on its own with a separate video step: applicants were asked to go on camera and briefly hold up their ID. “We found that it was about an 85% drop-off," Dawn said. Candidates were being asked to share sensitive identification with a company they had never met, and the process ended up screening out honest candidates along with the fraud. 

Activus had been running background checks through GoodHire when Checkr acquired GoodHire and migrated its accounts over. Dawn's team did what any team would do after an unplanned vendor change: they evaluated pricing, speed, and flexibility against the market. Checkr won every comparison they ran.

Activus continues to value Checkr for the partnership. When the team needed a better way to manage closed candidate files, Checkr worked with them to create an archiving approach that fit their workflow. "We asked, and they provided, and it's been a great relationship since then," Dawn said.

That same collaborative approach showed up again when Activus changed applicant tracking systems. Their Checkr customer success manager proactively worked with the new ATS vendor to get the connection set up before Dawn even had to ask. So when the switch to the new ATS happened, the integration was already up and running.  

At a Checkr Customer Advisory Board event, Dawn raised the impersonation problem with the room. "I brought the issue, and here we are in June talking about a solution," she said. "I wouldn't say I was the only one with the problem, but I was able to speak about it, and it was understood." Six months later, Activus was not piloting a fix; it was running one.

Once a candidate has applied, been reviewed, and completed a live interview, Activus runs IDV as the first step before anything else moves forward. If a candidate fails IDV, nothing else runs. "The rest of the background check doesn't run," Dawn said.  

That sequencing gives Activus more room to focus on the people they actually want to hire. By catching problems early, they avoid unnecessary background check costs, reduce manual follow-up, and spend more time talking with qualified candidates—moving from six or seven candidate conversations a day to 10 or 12.