First Advantage Corporation (First Advantage) provides employment background screening, identity, and verification solutions.
Enabled by its proprietary technology, First Advantage delivers innovative services and insights that help customers mitigate risk and hire the best talent: employees, contractors, contingent workers, tenants, and drivers.
The company manages one of the earliest and most important interactions between an applicant and its customer. Most applicants view their screening e...
First Advantage Corporation (First Advantage) provides employment background screening, identity, and verification solutions.
Enabled by its proprietary technology, First Advantage delivers innovative services and insights that help customers mitigate risk and hire the best talent: employees, contractors, contingent workers, tenants, and drivers.
The company manages one of the earliest and most important interactions between an applicant and its customer. Most applicants view their screening experience as a reflection of the hiring organization and its onboarding process. The company's comprehensive product suite includes criminal background checks, drug and health screening, extended workforce screening, biometrics and identity, education and work verifications, resident screening, fleet and driver compliance, executive screening, data analytics, continuous monitoring, social media monitoring, and hiring tax incentives. The company derives a substantial majority of its revenues from pre-onboarding screening and perform screens in over 200 countries and territories, enabling the company to serve as a one-stop-shop provider to both multinational companies and growth companies. In 2024, as a combined company, the company performed nearly 190 million screens on behalf of 80,000 customers spanning the globe and all major industry verticals, including more than two-thirds of the Fortune 100, and approximately half of the Fortune 500.
The company's expertise and resources position it to grow market share by focusing on high-volume hiring industries and companies, increasing the company's share with existing customers, upselling and cross-selling new products and solutions, and winning new customers.
The company's verticalized go-to-market strategy delivers highly relevant solutions for targeted industry sectors. This approach enables the company to build a diversified customer portfolio and effectively serve many of the largest, most sophisticated, and fastest-growing companies in the world. The company has built a powerful and efficient customer-centric sales model fueled by frequent engagement with its customers and deep subject matter expertise in industry-specific compliance and regulatory requirements, which allows it to create tailored solutions and drive consistent upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
The company's technology is designed to be highly configurable, scalable, and extensible. The company's platform is embedded in its customers’ core enterprise workflows and interfaces with more than 100 third-party Human Capital Management (HCM) software platforms and Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), providing it with real-time visibility and input into its customers’ human resources processes. The company leverages its proprietary internal databases—which include over 900 million criminal, education, and work history records as of December 31, 2024—and an extensive and highly curated network of thousands of automated and/or integrated third-party data providers and robotic process automation (RPA) bots.
The company's focus on innovative products and technologies has been critical to its growth. Using agile software development methodologies, the company has consistently enhanced existing products and been early to market with new and innovative products, including offerings for biometrics and identity, continuous criminal monitoring, extended workforce screening, and instant oral drug testing. The integration of Sterling’s advanced identity verification solutions, including its partnership with ID.me, further strengthens the company's position in the market.
Growth Strategy
The company's strategies include continuing to win new customers; growth within its existing customer base through upselling and cross-selling; continue to innovate its product offerings; grow internationally; and leverage proprietary data.
Differentiated Technology
The company's front-end technology, including its powerful UI/UX design, creates a superior applicant and customer experience, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to optimize workflows and minimize applicant data capture errors and missing information. The company's back-end technology and processing engines seamlessly integrate interactions with customer HCM platforms and other software, government, and third-party data sources, as well as internal Operations and Customer Care teams. The company has been, and will continue to be, a pioneer in using automation and intelligent routing technologies to optimize turnaround times, quality, and touchless end-to-end screening.
The Legacy First Advantage background screening experience allows customers and their applicants to access the company’s technology through intuitive, easy-to-use user interfaces, including Profile Advantage, Enterprise Advantage, and Insight Advantage.
Profile Advantage: The company's applicant-facing technology, available in 19 languages, offers intuitive design with chatbot and AI support, liveness detection techniques, and ID verification for a streamlined applicant experience. Profile Advantage provides a modern, easy-to-use experience, which is critical to accelerating time to hire. It is often the first and one of the most important early interactions between an applicant and the company's customers. Profile Advantage can be accessed through a computer, tablet, or mobile device and is built for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ('WCAG') 2.1 to be easily accessed by everyone.
Enterprise Advantage: The company's core, proprietary, global end-to-end customer ordering and processing technology, Enterprise Advantage, enables its customers to order any of its products and solutions at scale. It has an average of 99.9% uptime due to its robust architecture design and it seamlessly integrates with its customers' business processes and workflows, third-party enterprise software systems, such as HCM and ATS platforms, and third-party data sources. Through Enterprise Advantage, the company's customers can easily manage their screening programs, either through centralized processes or by region or division, create customized screening packages, manage screening criteria, and administer adverse action letters.
Insight Advantage: The company's dynamic data visualization tool offers its customers data analytics, dashboards, and near real-time reporting to assess their screening programs' underlying drivers and make data-driven decisions. The company leverages the customer's unique applicant and screening data collected through Profile Advantage and Enterprise Advantage to create insights presented in dynamic dashboards. Customers have the ability to customize their dashboards and perform scenario analysis with the company's intuitive and flexible tools. Customers can also overlay key metrics from industry peer groups to discover and benchmark-practices optimize their screening programs to deliver best-in-class performance.
The company has designed its technology architecture for extensibility. The company receives data directly from the applicant through Profile Advantage and from the company's customers through their third-party HCM and ATS software platforms. This data is supplemented by the company's proprietary internal databases and external data sources as the company performs screenings and verifications. The company's proprietary internal databases of over 900 million records include the company's National Criminal Records File, which includes approximately 780 million criminal records with thousands of new records added daily, and Verified!, the company's repository of nearly 120 million primarly consisting of prior education verification records. These proprietary internal databases allow the company to complete its processes quickly, which accelerates the onboarding process for the company's customers and improves the applicant experience. The company also obtains data directly from federal, state, and local government entities, laboratories and collection sites, credit bureaus, and education and work history verification providers, as well as from third-party, independent compilers of public records. The company's API integrations, either through its Standard API or the company's REST API, allow for real-time, bidirectional, and secure data flows between the company and its customers' software platforms and external data sources, creating a seamless and integrated screening process.
Background screening and verification requirements vary from customer to customer, depending on the size and geographic footprint of the business as well as the industry vertical in which the customer operates. For example, customers in the transportation, logistics, and home delivery industry may have screening requirements relating to transportation regulatory bodies, including the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), FMCSA, FAA, and IFTA, that customers in other industries do not require. In addition, the laws and regulations on the use of certain information vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and are constantly evolving. The company has designed its technology to be highly configurable, allowing it to provide its customers with tailored solutions that meet their specific needs.
The company's flexible, scalable, and highly integrated technology, enhanced by its investments in automation and AI, has driven significant operational efficiencies and enabled it to achieve one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings. The company will continue to innovate using agile software development methodologies, focusing on user-centered design, to bring leading products and solutions to the market.
Technology and Operating Platform
Sterling’s technology platform complements Legacy First Advantage’s existing capabilities, providing a robust set of cloud-based, proprietary tools that enhance the company's service offerings. These tools provide access to court records, expedite workflows, and deliver, accurate results. The outputs of these technology tools are seamlessly integrated into Sterling’s customer and applicant interfaces, and Sterling’s customers’ HCM systems, enabling a simple, fast, and unified applicant hiring experience. Sterling’s systems cannot easily be replicated and have enabled the company to achieve some of the fastest turnaround times in the industry while maintaining the quality its customers expect.
Customer and Applicant Interfaces
At the center of the Sterling background screening experience are the Sterling Candidate Hub, Sterling Client Hub, and Sterling Analytics Hub, each purpose-built to meet the needs of specific end users.
Sterling Candidate Hub: The Sterling Candidate Hub is one of the first interactions applicants have with Sterling customers and positive first impressions can lead to improved job acceptance rates, employee satisfaction, and productivity. In response to these needs, Sterling developed an intuitive, frictionless, and mobile-first applicant experience. The Sterling Candidate Hub provides a streamlined process for applicants to interact with Sterling and manage their entire screening process. The platform allows applicants the flexibility to provide information from any device in multiple languages and enables them to save time with mobile document uploads and e-signature capabilities. The platform is intelligent, customizing the information requested based on the specific package of services ordered, ensuring applicants need not waste time providing extraneous information. Progress is managed through text notifications and reminders.
Sterling Client Hub: The Sterling Client Hub consolidates applicant orders and data into a single, unified workflow, allowing customers to easily place orders, manage tasks, monitor statuses, and view consumer reports. Results are easy to read with intuitive displays and collapsible/expandable search details. The platform is flexible by design, allowing customers to configure permissions, access control by role, invitation and task workflows, packages, and adjudication rules. Single-sign-on capabilities allow customers to manage their programs consistent with security best practices. The Sterling Client Hub is designed to be easily augmented with new services, and regularly updated to meet evolving compliance standards.
Sterling Analytics Hub: Sterling Analytics Hub provides customers with a customizable, powerful data analytics platform to display a comprehensive view of their screening programs. This robust suite of dashboards provides customers with the information they need to gain better insights and make data-driven decisions as they seek to manage, streamline, and optimize their programs. The Sterling Analytics Hub puts comprehensive program management one click away while providing drill-down capabilities and underlying data.
Technology
Sterling has continually invested, innovated, and iterated on fulfillment technology and data acquisition. The Sterling fulfillment platform leverages thousands of proprietary and AI-driven automation integrations, including APIs and RPA bots.
CourtDirect Technology: This technology automates a historically manual and time-consuming process by integrating with jurisdictions throughout the U.S. With access to millions of criminal records, CourtDirect provides faster turnaround times while decreasing human data entry errors. Because CourtDirect is a proprietary technology, Sterling uses vendors to retrieve county court records on a limited basis, unlike many of its competitors.
SmartData Technology: This technology operationally assists with criminal records matching and reportability using proprietary AI matching algorithms. The technology also standardizes criminal charges, conviction codes, and disposition codes among the thousands of courts within the U.S. Through years of work, Sterling has standardized thousands of permutations of state, charge, and disposition combinations. The standardization work that SmartData performs also allows Sterling to administer a customer’s customized adjudication matrix at their direction more easily.
Verifications Portal: The Verifications Portal is a proprietary fulfillment platform that delivers increased efficiencies, higher productivity, improved quality, and faster turnaround times for customers. The Verifications Portal’s functionality removes the need for manual work assignment by queuing up the next available work for a verifier based on the employee’s skill set. Additionally, it leverages algorithms to intelligently group and map work. The Verifications Portal is used in conjunction with direct APIs to the company’s vendor partners and its proprietary Verifications Contact Database that tracks known entities and their preferred mode of fulfillment, decreasing the verifier’s research time. This database is a proprietary asset compiled over many years and updated daily, providing a strong competitive advantage in enabling the company to fulfill verifications more efficiently.
First Advantage’s Product Suite
The company's comprehensive product suite enables its customers across all industry sectors to perform pre-onboarding screening and post-onboarding monitoring of employees, contractors, contingent workers, tenants, and drivers. The company generally classifies its products and solutions into three categories: pre-onboarding, post-onboarding, and adjacent products, each of which is enabled by its technology, proprietary internal databases, and data analytics capabilities.
Pre-Onboarding
The company offers an extensive array of products and solutions that customers utilize to enhance their applicant evaluation process, support compliance from the time applicant information is initially requested and submitted to an applicant's successful onboarding and enhance workplace safety. The company's technology is flexibly tailored to each customer's requirements, which could include a wide array of search categories, such as Social Security number verification, education and employment verification, federal criminal checks, statewide criminal checks, country criminal checks, sex offender registry, and global sanctions. The company's pre-onboarding products include:
Criminal background checks: Utilizes the company's proprietary National Criminal Records File database, along with court and other public records, to help identify relevant matching and reportable criminal record histories.
Drug / Health Screening: Offers various drug screening products, including saliva, urine, hair, and blood testing options, physical exams, and instant oral drug screening products performed by mouth swab collection.
Extended workforce screening: Enables the company's customers to efficiently screen large numbers of contingent, contract, and temporary workers across various search types.
FBI channeling: As an approved Federal Bureau of Investigation ('FBI') channeler, handles submissions of fingerprints to the FBI National Criminal Records database and returns Criminal Record Information from the FBI to authorized recipients, including through a secure connection to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ('FINRA'), and the Nationwide Multi-state Licensing System (NMLS).
Identity Checks and Biometric Fraud Mitigation Tools: Includes government ID validation, liveness detection techniques, digital fingerprint collection, and identity and fraud mitigation tools, now enhanced by Sterling’s advanced identity verification solutions.
Education / Work history verification: Verifies work history and education of applicants, leveraging the company's proprietary Verified! Database and SmartHub technology fueled by AI, internal fulfillment, or through relationships with other data providers.
Driver records and compliance: Collection and storage of driver qualification files, as well as drug screening and background checks to assist with compliance with the requirements of the U.S. Department of Transportation ('DOT'), Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration ('FMCSA'), Federal Aviation Administration ('FAA'), International Fuel Tax Agreement ('IFTA'), and other regulatory agencies across the entire U S.
Healthcare credentials: Through the company's extensive Healthcare Exclusions Actions and Licensures ('HEAL') product, verifies and documents the educational background, training, experience, and other credentials of healthcare employees, contractors, volunteers, and vendors, including identifying exclusions and sanctions by medical boards, Medicaid and Medicare, the Office of Inspector General, and the General Services Administration.
Executive screening: Provides in-depth investigative reports to confirm various aspects of credentials not typically covered by most background checks, such as civil litigation and bankruptcies, negative media searches, controversies and inconsistencies in business dealings, corporate and regulatory history, and potential conflicts of interest.
Others: Includes screening products such as global sanctions, professional licenses and credentials verification, and social media checks.
Post-Onboarding
Companies face a heightened responsibility to ensure safety and comply with laws, regulations, and licensing requirements after the initial screening and onboarding of an applicant. To assist those needs, the company provides its customers with continuous monitoring and re-screening solutions that are important tools to help keep their end customers, workforces, and other stakeholders safe, productive, and compliant. Continuous monitoring solutions allow customers to be proactively alerted as soon as relevant information, which may require immediate attention and action, becomes available. The company's post-onboarding solutions include:
Criminal Records Monitoring: Provides background screening reports on an ongoing basis post-onboarding of any reportable criminal records of their employees, contractors, contingent workers, and drivers.
I-9 Verification: Enables its customers to simplify and manage the process of onboarding new hires by streamlining employment eligibility verification through the convenience of digital workflows.
Healthcare Sanctions: The company’s HEAL product provides ongoing healthcare-related compliance monitoring, which helps the company’s customers comply with their obligations as employers of doctors, nurses, other employees, and vendors, reporting any changes in the status of required licenses.
Motor Vehicle Records: Provides customers with a streamlined process to establish an initial driver file and enroll drivers into the continuous monitoring program, which reports any driver records changes.
Global Sanctions and Licenses: Continuously monitors more than 2,500 source lists and searches a broad range of individual watchlists and key sanctions sources.
Social Media: Offers ongoing post-onboarding social media background screening reports tailored to a customer’s specific criteria.
Adjacent Products
The company also offers adjacent products that complement its pre-onboarding and post-onboarding products and solutions:
Fleet and Vehicle Compliance: Comprehensive solutions for fleet managers to support compliance with various state and federal requirements, including licenses, titles, registrations, and gas taxes.
Hiring Tax Credits and Incentives: Identifies and processes U.S. employment tax credits and economic incentive programs, including the Federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit (‘WOTC’) program and other federal, state, and local incentives. Uses data collected from applicants during their background screen to increase quality and efficiency.
Resident and Tenant Screening: Enables property managers, landlords, owners, and leasing agents to screen prospective tenants.
Investigative Research: Provides in-depth investigative reports, similar to the company’s Executive Screening products, used in performing due diligence of investment managers and senior executives before a major investment commitment or M&A transaction.
The company's suite of products is available individually or through packaged solutions configured and tailored according to its customers' needs. For example, through its RoadReady solution, it provides comprehensive driver and fleet solutions to assist with compliance and asset management. The company's driver compliance products include pre-onboarding background checks, MVRs, drug tests, driver files, and post-onboarding monitoring. The company's asset management products related to vehicle compliance include title management, registration, fuel and gas tax, permits, transponder management, and ongoing data analytics.
Suite of Services
In addition to Legacy First Advantage’s offerings, Sterling enhances the company's product suite with a range of identity verification and background check solutions that are critical in today’s hiring landscape. Sterling’s identity verification services provide its customers with real-time information about an applicant to help validate and verify who they are hiring before they begin a background check. With the continued movement toward remote work, the prevalence of digitized identification information, and the increase in data breaches, there is an ever-growing risk that an applicant may be using a stolen identity when applying for a job and completing a background check. The company's comprehensive set of solutions helps customers mitigate that risk through the following services:
Online Identity-as-a-Service Suite: Sterling’s exclusive partnership with ID.me provides an identity solution recognized as best-in-class and adopted by numerous U.S. federal agencies and states. This suite includes telecom and device verification, identification document verification, facial recognition with biometric matching, Social Security number verification, and live video chat identification proofing.
Fingerprinting Services: Sterling provides fingerprinting services through a proprietary technology in a single-sourced and convenient national network with locations across the entire U.S. This state-of-the-art digital fingerprint capture technology reduces rejection rates and speeds up processing for faster onboarding.
Background Checks: Sterling’s background check solutions utilize proprietary automation technology that delivers thorough, fast, and accurate records. This includes criminal record checks, sex offender registries, civil court records, motor vehicle records, executive investigations, credit reports, liens, judgments, bankruptcies, and social media searches.
Credential Verification: Sterling’s global verification services include employment verification, education verification, credential verification, professional reference checks, and Department of Transportation verifications.
Drug and Health Screening: Sterling’s U.S. drug and health screening services offer comprehensive pre-and post-hire drug screening with access to an expansive nationwide collection network.
Onboarding Solutions: Sterling’s onboarding solutions include onboarding forms that ease the burden of processing employee documentation.
Customers
The company serves a diversified customer base with 80,000 customers globally in 2024. The company’s customer base varies in size and industry, encompassing healthcare, retail and e-commerce, transportation, manufacturing and industrials, financial services, technology, media and entertainment, hospitality, business and professional services, general staffing, and gig economy. The company has executed a concerted go-to-market strategy to target customers with large, complex workforces and have built a leading customer portfolio in this area as a result. The company’s customers operate in different industries across almost all facets of the global economy, with particular strength in sectors experiencing favorable secular trends, such as e-commerce, retail, transportation, warehousing, and healthcare.
As of December 31, 2024, the company performed screens in over 200 countries and territories, with a major presence in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India. Approximately 86% of the company's total revenues for the year ended December 31, 2024, was generated in the U.S., while the remaining 14% was generated abroad.
Seasonality
The company experiences seasonality with respect to certain industries due to fluctuations in hiring volumes and other economic activity. For example, pre-onboarding revenues generated from the company's customers in the retail and transportation industries are historically highest during the months of October and November, leading up to the U.S. holiday season and lowest in December and at the beginning of the new year, following the U.S. holiday hiring season. Certain customers across various industries also historically increase their hiring throughout the second quarter of the year (year ended December 2024) as winter concludes, and the school year ends, giving rise to student and graduate hiring, and increased commercial activity tied to outdoor activities.
Trademarks, Service Marks, and Trade names
The company owns a number of registered and common law trademarks and pending applications for trademark registrations in the United States and other countries, including for example: First Advantage, Profile Advantage, Enterprise Advantage, Insight Advantage, Verified!, HEAL, RoadReady, Corporate Screening, and Sterling among others.
Acquisition
On October 31, 2024, the company completed its acquisition of Sterling Check Corp. (Sterling), a global provider of technology-enabled background and identity verification services.
Government Regulations
The principal laws and regulations that impact the company’s business include, but are not limited to:
the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which regulates the use of consumer report information and governs the accuracy, fairness, and privacy of such information;
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (‘Dodd-Frank Act’), which prohibits unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices with respect to consumer financial services practices;
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which regulates the use of non-public personal financial information held by financial institutions;
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which restricts the public disclosure of patient information and applies indirectly to companies that provide services to healthcare-related businesses;
Drivers’ Privacy Protection Act, which restricts the public disclosure, use, and resale of personal data contained in state department of motor vehicle records;
U.K. Digital Identity & Attributes Trust Framework, which provides for a set of rules and standards for digital identity products;
Various U.S. federal, state, and local data protection and consumer reporting agency laws at the state level, state data breach laws, and state privacy laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (as amended, the CCPA) and the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act;
International data protection, data localization, and similar laws and regulations impacting the company's services and data suppliers, such as the U.K. and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); and
Oversight by regulatory authorities for engaging in consumer reporting, including the FTC and CFPB in the United States.
History
The company was founded in 2002. The company was incorporated in 2019. The company was formerly known as Fastball Intermediate, Inc. and changed its name to First Advantage Corporation in 2021.
