Checkr CEO Daniel Yanisse built the company seven years ago to automate background checks for gig platforms like DoorDash and Uber. One-third of Americans have criminal records that block employment. Checkr now offers fair-chance tools: expungement funding, Candidate Stories letting people explain their past, and fairness-focused decisioning to help companies hire beyond the record.
Chapters
Awesome, thanks Taylor. Morning Daniel. So to kick it off, for people who don't know Checkr, can you start off by talking about your journey from founding the company 7 years ago and why the background check industry was appealing to you and the impact that your product has had on the ability of the gig to scale?
Yes, hi Kristen, hi everyone, um, great to see everyone today. So we started Checkr about 7 years ago, um, as the gig economy was scaling, we found a need for more automation in the space with background checks. And we launched the first API for background checks about 7 years ago. Our product was used by a lot of the gig economy companies who were growing at that time. Companies like DoorDash, Instacart, Uber were just at the beginning of their growth in— back in 2014. And with the Checkr API and automation, we've been able to help those platforms scale to the large companies that they are today. So that's really how it got started. And since then, we've grown our product, our team, our solution, and now we're becoming one of the leading companies in this space.
That's awesome. So one of the reasons why I joined Chekr is our mission. And as you know, our mission is to build a fair future by designing technology that creates opportunities for all. How did this become Chekr's mission and what does this mean today and how will this mission evolve alongside the future of work?
Yeah, so in the early days of Chekr, we discovered that there's a lot, there's a huge social and fairness issue in the US around criminal records and background checks. We learned that by talking to candidates who are applying to jobs and getting rejected again and again because of mistakes they've made in the past, in their past. And after doing more research, we discovered that 1 in 3 Americans have a criminal record. So that's a huge statistic. Over 70 million people have a criminal record and that can become a barrier for their employment. So at Chekr, we decided to go against the grain of the industry and really prioritize the candidate and fairness first. We wanted to help people get more opportunities rather than adding friction. So that's how our mission of building a fair future was born. And since then, we've really leading the space in that is called fair chance hiring or second chance hiring. So helping give second chances and opportunities to people even if they have a criminal record. And we do this a few different ways. We create a lot of education around the benefits of fair chance hiring for businesses, for diversity and inclusion. We ourselves at Chekr are a fair chance employer. We have tens of employees who have reentered the workforce and are very successful in tech. And we also this year launched a foundation to support free expungements of criminal records or help people clear their background so that they can get job opportunities. And we work with thousands of customers to help them change their hiring criteria to be more fair and benefit from Fair Chance Hiring.
That's awesome. I want to dig in a little bit more there. But we do have a poll up. So if everybody in the audience could just take a quick second to answer. How many of you are trying fair chance hiring in some ways. That'd be great. We'll review the results towards the end of the discussion. So Daniel, DoorDash was our first customer and they grew alongside us. Now we work with the majority of gig businesses in the United States. How have we, or how will we continue to partner with these brands to promote fair chance hiring both through technology as well as customer success? And what are some of the lessons we've learned from this group of customers that the audience could potentially take away?
Yes, so we start first with education. So we have a lot of educational programs online and we partner with customers all sizes to educate the leadership team, their recruiting HR team on how to do virtual hiring or what are the benefits. We also create what's called an online simulation program to show to all of the employees the benefits of Fair Chance hiring and also some of the challenges and stigma people are facing when they're exiting prison and trying to get back into the workforce. And lastly, once customers are interested and open to start a Fair Chance program, we help them put in place pilots or apprenticeship programs, and we have technology and different products that can help both automate those decisions and make sure that the background check criteria is consistent and fair. We have different products where like Candidate Stories, where we allow job candidates who have criminal records to share their own stories so that their story can show up next to their background reports for the employer to review. And then we have different fairness and decisioning products that help give second chances as well. So we do it through two different ways with customers. I would say one of the major learnings we've had with companies is most companies don't really know where to start. They might want to do Fair Chance Hiring, but they're wondering how to implement it and where to start. So our recommendation and learning is start small, baby steps, making a few tweaks to your program to accept people who have minor criminal records that really don't matter to your job is one of the best ways to get started. And then as you see the benefits of Fair Chance, you can scale your program to all of your employees, all of your jobs openings, and make more and more progress. But start small and we're happy to help at Chekr.
Yeah, it looks like so far in the poll, nobody in the audience has actually implemented or tried Fair Chance. Can you maybe share some of the early results, success results that our customers are seeing? For the audience.
Yeah, so we can track it. We can track how many people are doing Fair Chance, how many people are getting accepted even if they have a criminal record. And we have thousands of customers and doing millions of background checks and job applications a year. And we're really proud to be able to track the positive impact that is happening to our customers. This year, we're on track actually to have 3 million people with a criminal record to be accepted in their job position, which is really exciting and large-scale impact. And we're doing this with— in partnership with thousands of customers who are using the product and changing their rules to be more and more fair over time. A few examples. So we have a customer, Variabor, who is hiring a lot of workers. And this year they've helped 1,700 people on their platform get accepted with a criminal record, so we're potentially blocked.
