Just a few years back, only a handful of companies offered a simple interface to help employers quickly search the already haphazard and tangled web of federal, state, and local records. Even fewer of them gave employers results in a way that made it easy to understand the meaning behind the legalese. Compliance advice stopped at the federal level, ignoring the network of state and local ordinances that employers must follow. Amongst this broken system was born GoodHire with a unique vision of candidate-focused background checks, and an experience backed by an advanced public records search platform to champion a positive, fair experience for both employers and candidates.
When it comes to background checks, instead of simply delivering them, GoodHire humanizes them. Most employers run background screenings during a hiring process, and a conviction on a background check can follow a candidate around for many years. Unfortunately, the racial discrimination of the U.S. justice system is often mirrored in the criminal records checked by employers. Here, GoodHire has set out to address these issues with its revolutionary ‘True Me’ Candidate experience. True Me upends the systemic inequalities of traditional background checks, resulting in a better experience for job seekers and better-informed hiring decisions for employers. The company gives job seekers who have criminal records an opportunity to tell their story in their background check results, and it gives employers the power to see the real person behind the record.
Reimagining Background Checks
GoodHire reimagined background checks as a way to strengthen relationships with new hires instead of treating them as potential threats. The company welcomes its candidates into the background check process from the very beginning and gives them a view into their background check results. It makes it easy for candidates to add their own comments to the results in the company’s award-winning True Me candidate platform. Further, GoodHire’s adverse action workflow extends the communication between candidates and employers that started with True Me into a fair chance hiring process.
Additionally, GoodHire believes it’s just as important to be the best of the world as it is to be the best in the world. Imagine a world in which background checks make HR’s job easier, candidate relationships stronger, and communities better. GoodHire is now making it a reality.
When Two Entrepreneurial Brothers Founded an Organization
Entrepreneurial brothers, Brian Monahan and Matthew Monahan, Co-founded GoodHire in 2013 in order to help companies build great teams and adapt to the changing nature of work in an on-demand world. Currently, Brian is the Chief Idea Guy of the company. He finished two years at Harvard before continuing the Monahan’s college dropout legacy. Nowadays, his role revolves around strategy and analytics. Brian’s interest includes meditation and busting out the occasional rap. “No judge ever says ‘I sentence you to two years’ incarceration and seven years of unemployment,’ yet that’s often the outcome,” explains Brian Monahan, who set out to solve problems that were often created by big data when they launched GoodHire almost five years ago.
On the other hand, Matthew is the CEO of the company. He studied entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California. He dropped out of college after his sophomore year and joined his brother Brian to start GoodHire.
Making the Industry a Better Place
While an employer thinks about fair chance hiring, background check companies are not the first kind of organizations that come to mind. In fact, traditional background checks often form a barrier to employment with everyone in three American adults having criminal records. However, GoodHire is an employment screening company that helps employers and job seekers build relationship completely based on mutual trust, safety, and respect. Amid rising awareness of bias in the criminal justice system, GoodHire has exposed the role of employment background checks in perpetuating inequality.
Activists at the local level already understand the challenges that most of U.S citizens face while hiring. The ban-the-box movement has led to more than 150 local laws and 29 state laws across the U.S. that ban questions about criminal history from job applications. Still, most of the employers run background checks, which means a conviction can follow people long after they have served their term. GoodHire’s candidate focused True Me platform and the new ban-the-box and fair-chance-hiring complaint workflow represents the first proactive steps in the industry to help employers hire employees fairly and legally, no matter the jurisdiction.
Catalysts that Inspired GoodHire to Enter the Industry
Even a few years ago, imagining a world where background checks strengthen relationships between employers and new recruits, where questions are answered by knowledgeable and friendly people, where results help employers to see who the job candidate really is, was impossible. Matthew and Brian have already been quite successful in the big data business for a few years now, and have received requests by employers across the country to solve the problems related to employment screening in the same way they had for public records search, by putting customers first. The founders already knew that the industry was heavily regulated and competitive. However, when they saw firsthand the inherent bias in the data and how background checks perpetuated that discrimination, they knew they wanted to do something big. Future Path In less than five years, GoodHire has managed to turn the background check industry on its head. With more than 55,000 employers, industry-wide recognition, and a mission to redefine the standard for employment screening, GoodHire will continue to build off its candidate-centric model, compliance expertise, and Silicon Valley technology to address even more of the shortcomings of traditional background checks. However, GoodHire has some good news for employers. They just released more reliable, integrated identity verification in order to stop malicious intent before the completion of the hiring process, an industry first. This will help employers to move away from traditional reliance on eVerify and I9, which in the wake of data breaches like Equifax, make SSN and other personal identifiers unreliable.