Building a Custom Background Screening Program | First Advantage
2026-03-01 23:20 Diff
https://fadv.com/article/building-a-custom-background-screening-program/

Key Takeaways

  • Partnering with First Advantage delivers a customized background screening program tailored to your organization’s specific industry, regulatory needs, and workflows.
  • Expert implementation teams and consultative engagement ensure seamless onboarding and ongoing optimization through data-driven best practices.
  • Continuous collaboration and strategic communication drive automation, efficiency, and trust, helping organizations hire smarter and onboard faster.

First Advantage’s tagline is Hire Smarter. Onboard Faster.® But how exactly can your organization accomplish this?

Of course, there is no single blueprint every company can follow to achieve their hiring goals. That’s why we collaborate so closely with our customers to create custom screening programs that address their specific needs.

Optimizing your screening program requires working with a specialized team who understands your business, industry, regulations, and workflows. During this process we learn exactly how things currently operate, benchmark for your industry’s unique challenges, and then see all the positive results gained when you automate, integrate, and optimize.

But what exactly does this process look like? What can you expect when embarking on the journey to redesign your hiring program?

While there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, there are several best practices we follow when working with our customers to optimize their hiring and background check programs.

Get to know First Advantage better and learn how we’ll work with you as a new customer to craft a customized screening program that suits your exact needs.

Let’s Assemble the Components of Your Successful Program

Many interrelated elements and expertise go into creating a strong hiring program. Consider these for starters:

  • Strategic Engagement: It all starts with the right conversation; guided by our team, our customers give us the inside view on their current program.
  • Consultative Implementation: We then help you to create a tailored onboarding experience designed for your success, including solution engineers and our Six Sigma black belt team.
  • Proactive Partnership: We continue to add continuous value and optimization beyond go-live.

At First Advantage, our turnaround time for most criminal background checks is on average just one day.1

It’s a fact. Being methodical in your evaluation and implementation works. How?

First Advantage takes a consultative approach with our customers, first asking, “What are your pain points you need to resolve?” Sharing best practices and findings gained from other customers and industries, we explore your current program and processes so we can best know how to help.

Beyond the up-front evaluation, we then engage in deep-dive discussions. Through our close collaboration, we can learn even more about your organization than during the pre-sale process because now we’re engaging over months of working closely together on a daily basis.

Close collaboration is how it’s all achieved. This procedural approach is where a critical component of evaluation exists, transferring that data from pre-sale to customer.

At First Advantage, we use a Six Sigma Black Belt team to help evaluate and identify opportunities for optimization. We find that not only being granular on the front-end, but also doing an evaluation once programs are live, creates happy partnerships with our customers and has led to our 96% customer retention rate.2

Your Expert Implementation Team Plays a Vital Role

An experienced implementation team should play a vital role in your plan to create an outstanding hiring program. Why?

They must seamlessly manage the flow of information at every stage while you’re creating your background check program, so it’s essential that each step is carefully overseen.

Right from the outset, it’s critical to have an effective implementation team. It’s equally critical to tie it to the front-end process so that everything discovered upfront is reflected in the build of your solution. That’s why professional services are such a critical component.

First Advantage’s focus areas during your implementation phase will include:

  • Performance
  • Innovation
  • Partnership
  • Expertise

Our implementation teams also place a strong emphasis on verticalization and even sub-verticalization to contribute our data, expertise, and recommendations for your new program.

Strong Collaboration Takes Strong Communication

Project Team Collaboration

Our Customer Success team will help align our strategy to your organizational objectives.

Customer Success

Engaged from the outset  to grasp your specific needs and challenges

Solutions Design

Conducts consultative workshops to customize program design to your distinct requirements and hurdles

Integrations Specialist

Provides integrations expertise and support to ensure a flawless technical experience

Sales Partner

Ongoing knowledge sharing and engagement to guarantee program success

It’s important to follow a strategic evaluation and implementation process when you’re evaluating new tech processes and tech providers. That’s why First Advantage has frictionless internal communications among our teams so we can clearly and easily connect all the dots for our customers.

The First Advantage customer experience includes:

  • Strategic engagement
  • Consultative implementation
  • Proactive partnership

Unlike many vendors, we’re not here to tell you about our services. We’re here to learn about your business.

Our teams communicate closely with each other, creating a consistent partnership for our customers. We’re collaborative as a group internally, as well as with your own teams.

The goal of this process is to enable your organization to automate and optimize your program, and that applies whether you’re evaluating your tech stack, internal workflows, or looking to optimize processes within your organization.

Understanding What’s Important to You

Our Customer Success team will help align our strategy to your organizational objectives

  • Process
  • Efficiencies
  • Compliance
  • Risk Mitigation
  • Cost Savings
  • Applicant Experience
  • End User Experience
  • Time to Hire
  • Data Security
  • Technology

So, What’s the First Step?

How do you put all these elements together to create a best-in-class program?

As a tightly collaborative organization, First Advantage isn’t just a vendor; we’re a partner. Since there’s no single perfect solution, we leverage our strong customer service to act as your consulting team as we design something truly extraordinary together.

Contact us today and let’s create your custom program together.

About Aaron Cook:
Aaron is an operations executive with 20+ years of experience leading transformational change and utilizing data-driven analysis to achieve meaningful performance improvements. He currently is the General Manager, Americas watching over the healthcare, transportation, automotive, aerospace, defense, energy and manufacturing industries. He is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and holds an MBA from the Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

About Rachel Stringer:
Rachel serves as a Professional Services Leader, where she oversees and develops implementation strategies across various sectors including Healthcare, Education, Industrials, Government, Transportation, and Non-Profit. With 15 years of expertise in professional services and implementation, Rachel joined First Advantage three years ago with the mission of enhancing excellence in the onboarding process. She is committed to continuous improvement, emphasizing a consultative approach to customer experience and applying project management methodologies alongside automation techniques. Rachel holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Georgia and a Master’s in Business Administration from Georgia State University.

1 Source: First Advantage, as of 12/31/2024
2 Source: First Advantage, as of 12/31/2024

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