Background Screening Editing and Proofreading Services

A screening firm returns a report on a job applicant listing a felony conviction. The employer withdraws the offer. The applicant is a different person with the same common name, born in a different year, and the report never showed the identifiers the match was actually made on, so nobody at the employer could see that the only thing connecting the record to the applicant was a name. The applicant sues, the employer settles, and the screening firm spends a year explaining why its report presented an unverified match in the same format as a confirmed one.

We edit what background screening firms produce — consumer report templates and adverse-record disclosures, pre-adverse and adverse action notice letters, dispute and reinvestigation procedures and correspondence, applicant disclosure and authorisation forms, verification result formats for employment and education, criminal record search methodology documentation, client service agreements and permissible-purpose attestations, compliance and audit documentation, and international screening scope descriptions. Our editors work on the report a hiring decision gets made from in about ninety seconds.

The report entry describing a criminal record is what an employer acts on without ever seeing the underlying search, and its failure is a match presented with the same confidence as a verified identification. We work through these so the identifiers the match was actually made on — full name, date of birth, government identifier, address history — are listed with which ones matched and which were unavailable, rather than a record printed under an applicant's name with the basis of the association invisible; so a name-only match is labelled as a name-only match in the entry itself, since a report where a possible match and a confirmed one look identical is one a reviewer cannot read correctly no matter how carefully they try; so the scope of the search is stated with what it did not cover — which jurisdictions, which years, which record types — because an employer treating a county-level search as a national one is drawing a conclusion the search cannot support; so the record's own disposition is reported as the court actually recorded it, given that a charge, a dismissal and a conviction are different facts and collapsing them into an offence description misstates what happened; and so the date the record was retrieved and the source it came from are stated on the entry, since a stale record and a current one carry the same weight on the page and only one of them may still be accurate. Reports written this way let an employer see what the finding actually rests on.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including applicant data, client materials and search records. We are editors rather than screeners, compliance officers or lawyers, and we offer no view on record interpretation, adjudication or legal obligations. What we can do is make sure a possible match never reads like a certain one.