Employment Verifications: Innovation taking us beyond the standard background verifications

A lot of people signing in here. One thing that Kevin and I. And Kevin will not be on this webinar today that we like to chat about while we're letting people come on in is what are we reading? What are we. What books are we reading right now? I'll go first. I just started. I just finished a book by Bob Iger about his journey through Disney. It was fascinating.

He's been there for a long time, right?

Yeah.

Wasn't he, like, when was the CEO, then he retired and then he came back. That was the story.

I think he's. I think he's gone and come back actually, twice. I think he's on the. On the outs there right now. He's probably going to be leaving there again soon. But it's amazing what he's done with the acquisitions and everything else over the years at that company. It's. It's pretty spectacular.

It is. It is. Well, I didn't know his name until Ellen Musk last year called him out.

Yep. Let's give it another minute. There's still a lot of people joining the call. Frank just gave me a good book, no Encore. And I'm. I love. I love music. That. That looks really good, actually.

Innovators Dilemma is a good book. It's about monopolies getting disrupted by small startups, which I think is very, very topical.

So very topical for what we're doing here at Truth.

Yeah.

All right. Well, it's two minutes after the hour, so I say we go ahead and get started here. I wanted to thank everybody for joining us. I definitely want to thank Kirill from TRUV and Michael from First Advantage for joining me today to discuss a topic that's been hot for a couple of years now, and that's employment verifications. And, you know, as an industry here, we've been doing things the same way for a very long time. As we all know, it's getting very, very expensive now through. Through some of the different channels that we have available to us in the screening industry. And there's some new technologies that have been developed over the last couple of years, especially here, what TRUV has done, which we'll get to in a second, but we're going to have a discussion today. We operate is, for those of you that have been on our webinars before, we run this very organically like a radio show. There's. There's no rehearsal, nothing. We're going to talk about what. What TRUV does and. And how First Advantage uses it and what I'm really hoping. And what's really important to us is that you guys throw questions in the chat. The last time we did a Product Spotlight, we had nearly 60 questions. We didn't get to all of them, but we'd like to get to as many as we possibly can. So go ahead and throw your questions for the panel into the chat and we'll get to them towards the end. For those of you that don't know me, my name's Jason Morris. I've been in the background screening industry for, God, nearly 30 years. I guess 27, 28 years now. I was the founder and one of the owners of Employee Screen iq, a full service background screening company that we sold to Sterling in 2015. I was one of the guys that got together with a few other guys and got PBSA started back in 2002. I served as chairman early on and was on the board for quite some time. I maintain my status as a thought leader in the industry. I do a lot of writing and publishing. And what we do here at employees at iCube Advisors is we help advance the CRA industry. We help background screeners. We're a very niche boutique firm dedicated to the background screening industry. We do recruiting, we do some M and A advisory, we do a lot of consulting, expert witness work, general advisory. And my favorite is the thought leadership in advancing the industry. So that's some of the things that we do over here at iCube Advisors. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Kirill and Michael and they'll introduce themselves and we can get started.

Michael, you want to go first?

All right, sure. So I'm Michael Skeen. I'm a senior product owner here at First Advantage. I oversee our domestic employment verifications. Been here about a year and a half. So I'm really excited to bring a lot of the ideas from outside the industry with a background in data and analytics in infusing that into the process so that we can improve and hopefully increase the efficiency of the way things are accomplished.

Thanks, Michael. Jason, thanks for organizing this. I'm Kirill and I'm co founder and CEO of Truth. We've been in business three and a half years now. Time flies. We are a consumer permission data platform. What that means is we help remove the middleman, like those who aggregate the payroll or who block you from calling the employers. We actually partner with directly with a consumer and in partnership with the consumer. We can verify their employment by logging into their payroll accounts, employer accounts, any way we can do it digitally on Behalf of the consumer and their partnership, we can do it. We started with just simply having one integration called ADP, and now we have 13,000 integration. We could only log in into. We can only repay stuff back in the day. Now we can read every document that you can find in the payroll. And I think that what's most important for folks on this call is we can solve some of the problems that you might be facing with a standard solution in the industry. And hopefully we can talk about it in somewhat of a detail today. I'm really excited about this.

Great. So I'm going to set the table here and take a step back and let's talk about how verifications used to work. I've been doing this since the mid-90s, and, you know, when we first started doing this as an industry, you know, we get a paper job application faxed over to us, and if we had a system, we put it in there. If not, we just, you know, had it in front of us. And, you know, to do the point verification back then, it was typically you would call the company, let's call it Best Buy, you would get ahold of somebody in H.R. finally, that might take a day just to get a hold of the right person, and they would ask for a signed release. In order to release that information, we'd fax over. We had tons of fax machines. We'd fax over a request for verification with the release and just hold our breath and try to get it back within the next week. As things advanced, the technologies got better and better. We had automated some automated options where we can automatically fax out the request to the employers, and we'd see those come back in and manually put them back into the system. As things advanced, we had barcoding and everything else that would come back on the faxes that would help us relate that particular search to that particular search in our system. But what also happened in the mid-90s was a company called the Work Number, which we all know today's talks, started aggregating this type of data. They'd get it from employers, they would buy the information from everywhere they possibly could, and then they charge background screeners and candidates to access that information. That database just grew and grew and grew, and now today holds a very large percentage of the verifications that are done in this industry. And as we all know, the prices have gone up significantly. So just like other products that we have in this industry, and if you've read my postings and listened to these webinars in the past, eventually Somebody's going to come from the outside and disrupt. And that's what's happening here with consumer permissioned. Consumer permission data, what TRUVA is doing. So we're starting to see new ways of doing things and new ways of thinking to do things. And that's what really excites me about truv because they're bringing a whole new way to do this that I would have never thought of in the past. So with that let's, let's talk about how troop started and maybe you can relate it to plaid a little bit. That was the best relation that I had in the beginning when you guys first started and how it works. And then let's talk to Michael about how it's implemented over at First Advantage and and then we'll kick it back around and ask some questions.

Awesome. Well, it started with my. I graduated, I'm an immigrant. I moved to US in 2013, went to business school, graduated, got a job in Silicon Valley. I thought that I was doing well until I applied for a loan. I nobody told me that 520 credit score is not good enough to get any type of loan. So. So I applied and I got rejected. And when I asked, well, in the process they also lost my paystubs multiple times. They didn't know quite how to evaluate me. And when I was talking to the loan officer was like why, why don't you approve me? Because I have a good job and asking for like a very small amount of money. And he said that well, we have your pay stub but we don't know what to do with it. Maybe they're fake, maybe they're not real. We don't know how to evaluate you as an applicant. Right. For as a borrower. And that kind of kicked off the journey for truth where we really wanted to solve the problem of understanding because some somebody whether somebody has a job and whether they how much money they're making. And I think what's applicable for background screening industry and this is Jason, you are probably the fifth person I ever spoke about truth when I called you. What's applicable for background screening is an industry is we describe pretty much all the income information that we would need for mortgage application or for personal loan application or getting car loan. But we do use employment verification piece. Right. We can understand how long you've been in the job, what's your title looks like what's the level was at and basically everything that you would need from employment verification perspective. The way it works is fairly straightforward. Imagine we are I'M in front of you and I ask you like, who's your employer? And you say, well, I work for First Advantage. Right, for example, and we know from, historically we know what First Advantage is. It's like fadb.com, we have a database of 2.3 million employers. We'll find First Advantage and we will tell you, well, logging into your workday account and then you will type in your login and password for your workday account where you log in every day. We would log in as you and we would find your historical information in the system, read it, grab it, and return it back to you as a background screener instantly. So effectively it's a short circuit process of going back and forth, sending documents back and forth. The data comes directly from the source and it's very reliable. If that doesn't work, then the Border can upload their paystubs w2s. Whatever format of information they have about that could prove that they work there. We can read it instantly and again pass them along and say, well, verification is done. It works extremely well for your current employment. And we'll talk about success metrics in a bit. But I don't remember what I used five jobs ago. Nobody does. And it doesn't work for. If you want to verify somebody's employment 10 years ago, it works very well for current employment.

Most recent point, which I think, you know, I think that's really the most important thing that you can get in a verification. You know, when, when this industry started, the reason we did verifications and point verifications was because that isn't hiring. If somebody acted out violently at a previous job or sexually harassed somebody and, and our clients, your customers, didn't uncover that under the negligent hiring doctrine. If you could have known, you should have known. Well, that's all been turned on its head because they don't give you that information anyways. I mean, I don't remember the last time hearing about a past employer shoveling up some dirt on one of their past employees. It's very rare that even happened. So I think if I'm an employer and I'm hiring a lot of people, I agree. I really am only looking for their current employment and what they just most recently did at their most current job. And I think that background screeners that have the desire to still do that 7 to 10 year look back are not doing much good for their clients. The tools available today that allow us to get the information in real time from a current employer, I think is really what they're looking for.

I can only talk from a perspective of a small employer. We employ 70 people. I, I don't really want to know what you did five years ago, but I do really want to know, like, what was your title, how long you work in most recent job. Because that usually carries the most weight for, for any employment verification. And I'm happily pay for it. Say 10, 15, $20. I cannot pay for this. Hundreds of dollars. Hundreds of dollars. And we know that with their recent price increases that I think it's getting. It got out of control when we started the company, but now it's, it's just, it's just racketeering.

Yeah. I think in the last three years, it's probably. The price has probably doubled three times.

Double three.

Yeah, that is true when you look historically at what it used to be back in 2021, even up till now.

Yeah. Well, let's. Having said that, let's. Let's do our first poll question. And again, I want to remind everybody, we'd love you to ask questions. We'll save them up for after hearing from Kirill and Michael. But throw your questions in the chat because I think that you guys are going to have some good insight into this. So the first poll question. Let me figure out how to do this is. Hang on, I just lost my poll question. So let's go, let's keep going. Keep going.

Keep going. So I think I see a poll questions, but I think that maybe, maybe it was worth. There's a good question. Let's see. Is there a reason that no one has created an integration that collect IRS transcripts? There are ways to collect IRS transcripts. We actually do this. It's called form 4506T. The challenge with that, it takes up to seven days. So it's not instant. And it's one of the ways to verify somebody's tax records. But I don't think it carries title. It doesn't carry like some of the information it gives you. You wouldn't know when they started. You might know that the employer exists. So it's worse solution than pay stub upload or payroll. I should do the.

Okay, this is another question that came up in the Q and A is do we have a list of companies that provide data to you?

Okay, so there are. I think there's a mix of questions in chat and in, in the Q and A. Yeah. So, yeah, I took a note of that question. I think let's, let's just cover some of the questions in the chat. If the company, the. If the company the applicant works for does not have electronic access. What are you doing? Doesn't have electronic access. I'm wondering, like, what, what kind of company that is that in 2024 that doesn't have electronic access? Usually everybody has some version of payroll provider at the same time. If, if that happens, we can easily read the pay stubs you can upload.

Yeah, I can say, wouldn't that be a document upload situation?

There will be a document upload situation. And this, this is somewhat common for folks who don't want to share their credentials because they consider that we, we would never notify the employer. It's very safe. It's very. It's actually way more secure than sending past apps around the Internet. But for folks who are more comfortable uploading pay stubs, we can do that, too. After you do the verification. That's true on the verification record. And can you use it again in the future? It depends on the contract with a background screener. I think in some cases we do, in some cases we don't. And right now we actually don't reuse the historical verifications for a simple reason. The database is still fairly small. It's like millions of users at the same time. There's 162 million working Americans. So the chances of us are hitting our own database are pretty much negligent. And I'd rather invest time in making our technology work better and better every year and allow to maybe collect your IRS records or upload documents, different kind of documents. Has anything. Oh, go ahead.

I figured out my issue and my screen was off on the side. So we're going to go here. We're going to start a poll question, and then we're going to go to Michael. We're going to talk about how First Advantage utilizes true. And then we'll go back to some more questions.

Sure.

So the first question is, what's your priority with employment verifications? Are you looking to eliminate risk? Are you looking for speed? Are you looking for costs? So while people are doing that, Michael, let's, let's, let's get you talking a little bit and talk a little bit about why and how First Advantage started using TRUV and why you're using it and what kind of results you're seeing.

Sure. So one of the main differentiators, I'll say, before First Advantage versus other background screeners, is that we are not top of the waterfall with the work number in that we're trying to offer our clients options and choice in terms of where we go for the information and how we acquire that. And the primary way we accomplish that is through our verified system, which is really a combination of automation technology and proprietary data. So we have in house records that we use. We have automation, which is the true piece that plays into that, as well as technology, which is primarily driven by our smart hub routing technology, identifying which external source has that record or has the highest likelihood of fulfillment. When we were working through identifying pain points in the verification process, you know, there's criminal background, education, background, employment, et cetera. And what we saw is across all of those, the number one, the highest pain, meaning the most difficult to accomplish, as well as the most expensive at times, was present employment. So we were working through, trying to innovate essentially, of how can we use existing technology to retrieve records more efficiently, more securely, and, you know, faster overall. And that's where TRUV came into play. Kirill, correct me if I'm wrong, I think we've been working together for about two years at this point. So we've been with you guys since the get go. First Advantage, I believe, was the first in the industry to use this type of financial verification tool for the purpose of employment verification. And what we've seen is honestly, tremendous success whenever the. The applicant logs in through TRUV to retrieve essentially their own record of payroll, the turnaround time is drastically reduced, client fees are much more reasonable compared to what it could be. And First Advantage, our process is improved and streamlined a lot more. So everybody wins essentially with this tool. And it makes sense that this has been the future of verifications, and we appreciate everything True is doing to continue their integrations beyond payroll to other pieces as well.

So, yeah, when I heard that First Advantage was an early adopter of this, I wasn't surprised. I don't know if it's in the DNA over First Advantage or not, but, I mean, it seems like you guys adopt technologies very early on. You guys are, you know, you guys are definitely out there and adopting these new things and innovating in the space and whether it goes back all the way to candidate self service, the, the, the trans. How transparent you are early on with applicants so they can actually see themselves through the background scanning process. You guys really started doing a lot of that stuff before any other cra, which is very commendable. And I'm glad to see that you guys adopted this, you know, this technology very early on and are having such success with it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

The poll is over and the results are not surprising. The First Priority is cost. The second priority is speed. And the third priority coming in third is risk. Over 55% of people that answered the poll shared cost is their number one reason. I'm going to share that out there. Okay. All right. So, Michael, let's talk about a little bit about case studies and individual client success that you've had with with this product and the feedback that you've gotten from it.

Yeah. So what we have found again with pursuing addressing the pain point of present employment, we've seen applicants be hesitant or reluctant to provide the name or intentionally misspell the name of where they're currently employed. Again, all from fear of, I really don't want my current employer to find out I'm applying for another job. That's really the beauty of this tool in that it allows them to retrieve that record automated. It's extremely fast. I think less than, less than a minute, maybe 30 seconds depending. And it increases, like I said, the turn. It reduces the turnaround time of the entire case dramatically. We've seen from our clients which this particular tool is available to all domestic employment verifications.

Now.

We've seen an array of adoption within applicants. But the key factor, I would say in success from client to client is how well they communicate to their recruiters as well as down to the applicants about this option when the applicant is plugging in their profile, providing the information for us to then go hunt down and acquire and validate. If the applicant knows in the employment section, you going to have the option to do this. It's a great feature. It's helpful. Here's all the benefits. But if they know about it ahead of time, there's a dramatic increase in adoption as well from the applicant side.

So, you know, it's really interesting because, you know, going back 25 plus years, you know, contact, accidentally contacting a current employer was like the worst thing you could possibly do as a background screener. And now with a tool like this, and we had it in our contracts and we had like you could check a box to not call a current employee. Like, all kinds of ways to stop us from making a mistake of contacting them. Kirill, there's no way that an employer would find out that an applicant is getting this information. Correct. So having said that, like, there's no restriction on going to current employer on any circumstance. Correct?

There's no restriction. And the best thing is from employer perspective, it just looks like you're logged in into your system like ADP and download a couple of many steps or just looked at Your employment information depending on the use case. Right. So employer wouldn't know. But also going back to what is most important is like, if you can verify the current employer, then you can pretty much delay the rest of the investigation or looking at all the other employers and you can start start the job offer or you can start kind of even working on the job before you verify the rest, because the rest can take up to seven days, especially if it goes back waiting time, company shut down and all of those things. Michael, I guess what I also wanted to give a call out for to First Advantage is like, we've had a few background screeners trias, and I think the First Advantage has spent considerable amount of time thinking through the communication. If imagine it's just again, I like to think about product. As you're talking to a friend, somebody tells you, look, you're gonna come here, it's safe, it's secure, don't worry, you got it. Just enter your login information for a DP and you can start the job instantly. That's one way. Or they say another way is like, well, click this button and now give me your credentials for your employer system. And the first one people would be like, okay, I'm very comfortable. I would have high success rate. And the second one, they would abandon and probably call their employer and say, well, you're trying to. I don't know how much money I was making. It's very. It does feel insecure. And First Advantage has done an amazing job at explanation and kind of warming up the candidate. I think there's a question about this, about like, have we gotten feedback from candidates that they don't want this information to be collected? Again, First Advantage has building experience, which you don't want to do it. Try to upload documents you don't want to do it, just click button and move on. And it's up to the candidate to do it. And I think that's kind of. That interface makes a big difference from. And it can be either very successful or not successful at all. And all comes down with like how backgrounds, how much background screening is explaining it to their customers and the applicants as well.

So that's a great.

I think the candidate experience and the focus on the candidate experience is important here. So Michael, when you have this in your waterfall or however you set it up, what does that candidate experience look like and what kind of tools are you making available to them to understand exactly what they're doing?

So within our mobile web access for an applicant, providing information is profile. Advantage is what we call it, when they get to the section of employment, we kind of give a few intro pages explaining this is what we'll be looking for. You know, tell us about if you're currently employed or formerly employed, et cetera. What type of employment are you about to give us information about? And when inputting information, oh, I'm about to do a current employment. We provide a handful of different options. Great. Tell us how, how that current employment. Excuse me, not how the employment. Tell us which method you would like to use to verify that employment. So we give them the option again to manually type it in and then hunt down through traditional methods. Or you can go ahead and reduce the turnaround time and get that offer quicker by go ahead and connecting to your payroll. Click this button and there are a few again, notes to the applicant. A lot of it really is context when communicating this tool to clients for them to translate then to their recruiters and their applicants. The way we explained it a lot was this is the exact. Again going with the. The model of it's a financial verification tool that we're using for employment or we're using for the use case of employment. This same technology is already being used all the time in banking. If you want to go to, if you want to go get a mortgage or apply for an auto loan, this will be an option for you to verify that you're currently employed. Verification of income. Here we're using the exact same technology that applicants are already willingly doing and we're using it in a different context. So that's why the applicants really need to know ahead of time, either through communication or a few screens explaining what this is, how it's helpful, and why it makes sense that that process really helps put, put any potential fears at ease. I would say not all, but in general.

And on your customer service side, are you getting, getting any calls like how do I do this? What is this? Or is it pretty much self explained up front?

It's. It's really pretty straightforward. You know, as always, you'll get a handful of questions here or there. But again, more often than not, it's because clients didn't quite understand the nuance or they had a question about something that we pull up a document and say, here's what it is. This is what to expect. You know, again, it's helpful for applicant client and us across the board.

Okay. And, and this is probably a question more for Kirill, because I'm. You're probably not comfortable answering it. But what we know this isn't a Silver bullet. This isn't taking care of all the verifications you do as a company and we've known that for years when we first started talking. But what percentage of verifications is it? Do you estimate that it's taken care of and is that number how, how large you commit number can grow to.

I. I would just give a range and thanks for not putting my Michael on the spot. It's the range is depending on how well you explain it can range from 35 to 50% of the applicants can go through this process and connect their payroll provider around 25% of the time. We would return multiple jobs that we find in the payroll provider that is popular, something like kdp. We would return all the jobs that we find there for the same price. So 35 to 50, that's kind of the first number. If you add the document upload on top of it. We actually one of the challenges with generally in background screens with the document upload is once we upload paste up, you don't want to see it actually you have to pass it along to the employer and employer should look at it and the employer doesn't want to see it and that creates a problem. And we're this happy intermediary which actually will read the pay stub programmatically using machine learning or how we call it this day's AI. And we would use the AI to read the pay stub and we'll return you the information that we read on the pay stub as a furnisher. So you wouldn't need even to worry about reducting the pay stub. So you have returned the data that we return you the data that we saw in the pay stub. So if you look at just the payroll application, then it's 35 to 50%. If you had a pay stub then it moves to more like 45 to 60% of verifications could be done automatically. And the remainder you have to sometimes go to through a waterfall. You could go to Experian, you could go to the work number, you could go make a phone call. There are ways to solve the remaining 40% quickly.

Great. Okay, so let's, let's do it. Let me ask you a question. This way. I am applying for a job over at First Advantage. I used to work at Sterling. I don't remember what my username and password was to access my payroll information. How does that work? What does that look like?

So it depends if it's. If it's Sterling payroll system from 20, say 2012, we probably wouldn't be able to help. But if it's you work there currently, it's the most current, your current employer, then first we would know that, which system they use. And sometimes in the case of edp, for example, you actually don't need to remember your login and password. Would ask you for your first name, last name, your mobile phone number. You'll get a six digit code and snap. We logged in as you got the information and that's really it. That's how straightforward can be. We're making it very easy, Jason. We remember 250,000 employers in the United States and we know which of them use which payroll provider. So out of 2.3 million employees in the database, roughly 10% we have logged in and we know which payroll provider they use. So it eliminates all of the friction as much as we can, especially for the bigger employers. Like Strong, for example.

Yeah, it seems like there's very little friction. I mean, to be honest with you, it seems like a very straightforward, easy process that's been very successful, especially for.

Yeah, and on the applicant side as well. Again, the way we explain it to clients as well as applicants with any questions, the user experience is the exact same. If they download the workday app on their phone and then they're asked to log in on your phone, if you forget your password, just like always, you can reset it there and then be able to log in through your phone. Except what we have done is integrated that capability within the applicant, within the applicant process.

Okay, I'm going to throw up another poll question here. And the question is, have your employment verifications increased or decreased and by what percentage? Okay, all right, I have another question. Can, can you guys, I mean, if I sign up with True and I start, you know, utilizing you for, for this entire process, can the payroll companies just get upset about this and just block you or block your IP or anything else there? Like how, how does that work?

Oh, that's my favorite question.

I know, that's why I asked.

Because under 1033 act, payroll is considered. There's. I can share with you a letter from like Santa to CFPB saying, hey, payroll data is no different than bank data and you should be treated, should be treated the same way. Now of course they love selling the data to the work number and the like, but and taking like 3,400 million dollars in a year off of that enterprise. They try, unfortunately for them, it's not as easy as one could imagine. So success rate for the payroll providers to be able to walk us Is it's nothing. It's like zero percent. So are they getting upset? Probably not. Because that they're not supposed to be selling your data without your permission. Right. Adp. When you sign up to get a job with a company that uses adp, you never explicitly say, well ADP just go send it to the work number. And in background screening it doesn't get as ridiculous. But in mortgage, when you apply for the mortgage next time and they run you for the work number, you will actually pay $350 for your own data to close your own mortgage. It's out of control.

I'm glad you brought up mortgages because just the audience really understands background screeners are a very small piece of what Groove does. You know, this is a really unbelievable product also for the mortgage industry. And that's really where you guys are starting to see some, some hockey stick success, correct?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's. We have. I think it's also adoption. Right. The. We've seen this in other industries like embed aggregation. If you were to ask somebody in 2012 to share their banking credentials, that would look like a 100% scam. Now I think in every fintech app that I connect my like my bank account, it's plaid or one of the similar companies. And that's exactly what's happening with payroll aggregation and what we do. So something that looked very scary two, three years ago looked very normal today. And thank you for like innovators like in the industry, like First Advantage who actually took a bet on trying a company that or technology that was new and making it work.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's. That that should definitely be a signal for, for cras out there that this, this works. It works in the field and the. One of the biggest companies in the industry is having a ton of success with it and I know that, I know that a lot of the larger cras are currently using this could. Okay, so the poll question, I put the results up there. We are going to have one more poll question when we're done here. I wanted to get anything else that, that Michael and Kirill wanted to add and then we have a ton of questions to go over. So let's leave some final thoughts here for from Kirill and from Michael and then let's move on. Krillin want to go first.

I would just say that it requires a bit of work to implement solution like this, but it will give you freedom and I think freedom is worth a lot of, a lot of money. You just mentally not thinking about the next price increase and how you're going to call your customers and say, well, you know, it was $20 and this year it's $50 and the next year is $100 and who knows what's going to be next year. I think buying that freedom requires a bit of work. But we're here to help. If done enough times, would love to help help you and see if we can fit into your process.

Kirill, before you, before you wrap up here, how do you separate yourselves from your competitors like Argyle and Measure One and some of the other guys out there. What's different about you guys?

I think the few things there's a. Without going into much of a detail of like how we compete with the competitors, you should just sign up for a demo and see it for yourself.

For sure.

With all three, those that you mentioned, success rates are different. We're. I think our success rates are much higher than the competition. But again, this is a CEO of a software company telling you that we're better than competitors. Just sign up for a demo. See for yourself. Truly. And we have a busy customers like we, we work with a lot of mortgage lenders and background screeners and the technology doesn't change from industry to industry.

Yeah, I mean you certainly shut me up a couple of years ago when, when I told you that this would never work and you're like, no, you're not, you're not understanding it. And you showed it to me and I was like, wow, this is pretty damn cool. So okay, Michael, how about you?

If I could just echo Kirill, what you were saying as well. We had first advantage in seeing the trajectory of price increases and just the overall process of the verification of the background verification process. Excuse me. We really appreciate everything that truth has done. We think that it's a fantastic tool and we have very much used it as an integral part of our again, verified system, combining automation technology and proprietary data. The, the aspect of providing options or freedom, as you would say, Kirill, really resonates with us because whenever there is only one source naturally lends to the results that we're seeing now with the increase of price and the, the market and how they have built that up. But whenever you expand the option for applicants to retrieve their own information, that really is a game changer. Yeah.

You know, one thing Kevin and I were talking about yesterday as we're reviewing what we're doing here today is the fact, you know, just like identity services, the, the biggest companies in, in the space today are offering identity services and the smaller companies and the mid sized companies aren't. They just don't have the sophistication or the technology to really build it in yet. What's happening though is this is to become an expectation from your client base or your potential client base that you have a tool like this in your, in your arsenal. I, you know, we're going to talk. I know one of the questions is about integrations with some of the platforms. I know those integrations exist, but these are tools that if you want to compete and you want to compete with the big boys, that this is something you have to have in your, in your arsenal. And we've seen that over and over again. So. All right, great. We're going to go ahead and launch one more poll question and then we're going to get into the questions here. The Q A. So in. Oh, I didn't do this one. Right. So we're not going to do it. Sorry. Okay, no poll question. All right, so let's start with some of these questions. All right. Can a candidate store verified information from a, from, from former employers something that they could share with a potential new employer? So I think what he's saying there is if I just keep my W2s, can I just present them to an employer? I'll answer that. I don't like that. As a background screener, I want a third party to verify and validate the information so I can make sure that it's not forged. Let me answer that one. Okay. All right. After you verify the employment, do you own the record or does the CRA own the record? And does that and does anyone have the right to resell it?

I would just say that we, as a furnisher, depending on how the contract set up, we prefer you hold the record and we prefer you don't resell it. So generally that would be the answer. I don't like the idea of selling somebody's data without their permission. It just doesn't feel right to me. Instead, they should just re log into the payroll provider again when they change the job and solve the problem that way.

I agree with that. That just feels dirty. Right. How often is the candidate logging in versus skipping the step that you're presenting to them?

If success rate is, say apparel is 35 to 50% and plus document uploads 45 to say 60%, then the remainder 65, 40 to 65% of people will skip the process. And this is normal because it's not for everybody. Some folks don't feel comfortable doing it and the adoption grows over Time. So I think we will be. We started at about 25% with 35% success rate. And I think we can get to average. Right. Like, we can get to probably like 45, 50 if it's executed well. I would love to share the stats, but I think we can do it. We can do it in personalized demo.

Okay.

Right.

Kirill, across your customer base, how much pushback from their applicants do you see with unwillingness to provide access to their HR workforce sites?

I would say, Jason, it's either nothing or a lot. And it really depends on the CRA being able to explain what are they doing with this data. Like, if you prompt the employer correctly and like Michael said, you educate the. The customer up front. Right. And you educate the applicant up front, at least even in the email. Say, well, we might ask you for pay subs. You don't have to do it if you don't want to it, but it's safe, secure, and you're going to get through the job faster or through verification faster. It's pretty much zero when it comes to the other side. If you don't explain anything, then everybody would be thinking this is a scam like and.

Right.

Feel comfortable and there's pretty much nothing in between.

Is is true. Providing position and job title with results or just dates or what else could be on there.

80% of the time will return to the job title. Great.

So 80% of the time it includes more than just the dates of employment. That's great.

It's dates of employment title. Yeah. Okay.

Michael, has First Advantage ever tried to work with any of the other larger series to share their data with one another or sell those records as a new revenue source? And I think what that's getting at is there's been talk over the years of doing some sort of consortium among. Among background screeners. Have you guys looked at that at all?

I certainly would not be able to share that just directly, but I will say that again, our stance with the mindset of innovation and options to our clients is that we are always looking for ways to lower cost and increase efficiency. So I would just leave that.

Okay. A couple of these questions are easily answered with the demo, which I highly recommend that you guys sign up for because again, as those that know me, I'm a. I'm quite the contrarian when it comes to new products in the industry, especially from a compliance standpoint. And. And this one blew me away early on. Okay. How do you find employers that the applicant might have withheld or gaps in work history they're performing the actions. How does the applicant log in to pay? That's. That's a different one. Okay, so how do, how do you find employer. How do you find employers that the applicant might have withheld or gaps in the work history, which I don't think that you can. Is that the answer?

We cannot. Neither can the work number or any other software, because nobody has a complete database. If you want to find gaps, you have to ask the user to pull IRS tax returns. And then you would see everything, including how much money they made, where they leave and everything else. But that's, I think, an overkill. Maybe for some jobs where you want somebody in a, in a doctor position or like very high risk job. Right. Or they're serving a nuclear power station, I would love to. For that person to be properly verified. For most jobs, I think this is more of a theoretical exercise around like gaps in employment than it's actually that important to catch it.

Yeah. It also, again, begs the original question, does past employment matter as much as the current employer? And I think with the way that the industry is moving and with, you know, with how extensive the data is getting, I just don't think that it matters. And again, bringing that back to the whole negligent hiring thing, you know, plaintiff's counsel is going to say, well, you know, seven years ago they were fired from this job for acting out violently like I make. I would make the claim that they're never going to tell an employment, Employment screener that anyway, so it's worthless.

Yeah, I would say, just from our perspective, there are some clients and some industries in general that do very much want to know, you know, from start to finish during this time frame, you know, please look for employment during this range. Whereas others, to your point, primarily just want to make sure have they been recently employed or that scope does vary from industry to industry.

Right. And Michael, as we know as background screeners, you know, transportation is the big, is the big one. There anything in airlines or trucking, they have to go back a certain amount of years and do this. But you take those guys and set them aside and health care, everybody else really needs it. Healthcare, Right.

Yeah.

But beyond that, the unregulated. I mean, if you're an unregulated industry, I just don't see why you're chasing this information and making the background check take three days when it can take a day.

Yeah, true.

A lot of questions here about first advantage and how. What percentage they're completing with it. That's proprietary, so we can't go ahead and ask that has candidate feedback collected post using the solution compared to legacy employment verification and is that document. Is that. Has that process been documented?

If I understand the question correctly, essentially how has the client responded before this tool was implemented and now that it has?

Yeah, let's answer it that way. Yeah.

Okay. If I understand that it's tremendous. I would say again, the adoption rate within a client's applicant base varies from individual to individual. But on a whole, when the client, the recruiters, the HR staff, when they understand the significance of the tool and how this is a significant way for them to reduce their own bill essentially is by, you know, indicating and informing their applicants. Here's a more helpful method. That's tremendous. Like I said, from one client to the next, the percent of their applicants who use this specifically for the present employment element can exceed even the numbers that gorilla's mentioned. But again, it all comes down to context and communication. But on the whole, clients love this. It's a game changer with turnaround time and cost.

Yeah, I mean they gotta love the bill. They gotta love the bill at the end of the month and how much that's gone down. Is salary information redacted.

It is not because we don't send you the salary information we as. And that's why as a new intermediary troop also helping you to an extent where even if we collect documents in the pay stubs we would run fraud check on it. It's not easy to trip our system up where you could go for 799buy online a pay stub and try to upload it. It wouldn't work. We would actually raise a flag and return the background screen that this is a red alert. You should really close have a look at close look into this. And once we read the pay stub and we verify it's not fraudulent, it's original pay stub from let's say adp, we would actually not return you the pay stub. We'll just return you the data that you need for verification. So however, if there's a dispute, we have the all of the data stored in our repository and we can go back and prove to you and the person who is disputing the OR has the claim that we actually have done this correctly.

Okay. If somebody needed to go back 7 to 10 years unemployment verification does TRUV allow for. I mean is there can it be used in that at all or.

We'Re good at current. I would say the primary case is good at current. I would love to say yes we can solve all the problems of employment verification. We cannot. Unfortunately it works extremely well for current Sometimes we it would happen that we would return you five jobs and that would be the end of the search for this for this specific applicant. On average people don't remember what they have been using like four or five years ago and especially 10 years ago. And sometimes they don't have access right after within two years. So usually you need W2s for the first two years after you leave the job. So you have access to the payroll provider for at least two years. But after two years they usually turn you off because they don't want to pay the payroll provider the fees for former employees. Okay.

Are you is Truva Fannie approved vendor?

We are approved by Freddie and if you have a relationship manager at Fannie please call them awesome. They will tell you what's the status with us there.

Is there a specific industry that true struggles to verify more than others?

I would say nurses is or nurses schools like teachers is a tough one simply because nurses change jobs often they usually hold multiple jobs. That's one of the problems. And on teachers they use systems from we once logged it into I believe a mainframe run system. It looks like a DOS machine. They're just very outdated. So they haven't updated the technology for a little while and as a result those are challenging.

Yeah and I expected that especially with nursing. I mean again we said this in the beginning and you and I talked about this years ago. This is not a silver bullet. This does not take care of, you know all your verifications but it really puts a huge dent in it and it's something that will definitely lower your costs and increase your speed as background screeners. Another question and this is a I think we've answered this but we're asking a different way here. With the growing number of jurisdictions passing laws prohibiting employers from inquiring about salary history is true building any compliance assistance for income verification verification information. Are you doing anything on that front?

We can verify income if you need to but it's it you again. We actually do grab the income information a lot of times because we want to read the title of the pay stab we want to read sometimes when the first pay stub was issued just to verify that somebody actually started on that date. Because admin HR admin is not system sometimes they don't keep the system up to date. So we try to make sure that the information is consistent. We would never return you that information. You wouldn't know that we have it because you don't. That's not the product you ordered. But if you want to verify income, then we can return you the whole breakup of income by month, by every paycheck for the last three years plus w choose.

But on the compliance front, because there are states that are asking for employers not to ask that information. Do you have any compliance things built into the system?

Yeah. So again, if you ask for employment information, we would not ask for that information.

Okay. Somebody asked, do your clients have any concerns about candidates omitting previous employment by only receiving current deployment? And I think I answered that question early on by saying it's. That information is just not relevant, you know, as it used to be. As relevant as it used to be. And as background screeners, we have so many other tools and services that we can sell to our clients that are going to give you more validation on an employee, on an employee or potential employee than doing things the way we used to do them. Can true request employer information from. From the IRS to get previous employer info?

We can, we can. It's a different product. We haven't tweaked it to employment verification market. But if somebody is interested, let's talk.

Has true thought about using their technology and platform to collect college and degree information.

We have a very extensive roadmap. This item has never been on the roadmap simply because it's. It does feel like there's a lot of good solutions out there. One of our competitors is offering it. It seems like it's working fine. I would say employment verification, out of the things that you could possibly collect, is the most complicated. So we're just trying to solve the hardest problem whether we want it or not. When we say we're signing out to build this company, we're trying to solve the hardest problem, try to be the by far the best at it. And I think we would just stick to that mission and let other folks solve the school verification or college degree verification.

Okay, how is AI being utilized here? You can't have a tech. You can't have a tech webinar without mentioning AI. Right. It just gets everybody's ears perked up.

Funny enough, my co founder has started the text translation or machine translation group at Apple, which if you talk to Siri in Spanish, for example, it would talk to you back in Spanish. And he built that tech. And what we call AI comes in very different shapes and forms. I think the most recent advancement that we made is, it's a patent that we can actually log in into systems. We've never seen before. So this is a machine that actually I can say, well, logging into this system on my behalf if I give you these credentials. And it will do everything automatically without writing a single line of code. It's. It's really cool and it works. It's a little. It requires some tweaking sometimes, but it's for the long tail of payroll providers that let's say a payroll provider that serves like 100,000 people. There's 162 million employee employers employees in the United States. And then building to support just one yet employee payroll provider with a hundred thousand people is really tough. You just cannot have that many engineers. And that system handles it very graciously and it works well.

Okay.

And we have one more product on the roadmap around like Phone Call Automation. So would love to. If somebody wants to pilot it, give me, give me a ping. I would love to. I'm Kabila Truth.

Awesome. And we have a link up there for people to sign up for demos. And we only have a couple minutes left here before we finish. And before you give your final thoughts, I just want to know what platforms are you guys integrated with in the background screening world? We already know that you're integrated with all these proprietary systems that first advantage and accurate background all these companies use. But what about the platforms?

DAS works in SEO, so you have.

Pretty much the entire platform market. Those are the two biggest and you're probably hitting most of the midsize and smaller cras as well. So highly encourage those that are on tasworks and ASIO to get a demo and, and get this in there with your, with your list of tools for your clients. Okay, Kirill and Michael, I'd like to hear any closing thoughts that you have. And before you do that, I'd like to thank you guys for. For joining us today. There was tons of questions like I expected and you probably have tons more. So just make sure that you reach out to. To true to answer those. So let's start with you, Karl.

Well, going back to why we exist, it exists to solve my personal problem that I had encountered back in the day and I think we solve it really well now. So if you want to verify your current employment for in the background screening process, we are. We're really a very good SIG choice. At the same time, I just really wanted to say thanks to you Jason for putting this together. This has been an incredible experience and you introduce us to a lot of our first customers in the background screening. Actually you were the person who introduced us to First Advantage. So the loop has closed completely. And thank you very much for that, for sure, Michael.

Yeah, again, I could echo that as well. Thank you so much for. For hosting us and working through. This is an exciting topic, I think, to me, especially with all of the innovation going on right now in the world of AI. I mean, to me, technology is a tool. It's useful but dangerous. And sometimes people are more afraid to adopt the useful aspects of a tool before fear of the danger. But I love pioneers who can understand and grasp the potential of something, and partners like TRUV and others who are more visionary, I think, are leading the industry in adopting tools that everyone's going to be using again. User credential, user permissions, data has been and continues to be the key for the future in terms of verification. So we couldn't be happier.

There's no question you were spot on there. So. All right, well, I want to thank everybody for joining us. We'll be doing another product Spotlight next month and for the months coming after that. Hope everybody enjoyed the show and we'll talk soon. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.