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HireRight experience (spoiler; it was bad)

Year ago, Iโ€™ve got a job offer from a company. I liked the offer, so Iโ€™ve decided to accept it. "One more thing", they said:

You will also be receiving a link from HireRight requesting you to fill out an online background check. Please do this as soon as possible.

Okay. That should be fairly easy, I thought.

Several days later, I've received a link, as promised. I've clicked on the link, and created some kind of account on the HireRight page.

A warm welcome, isnโ€™t that nice?

From what I could understand, HireRight is a company, which does your background check. From what it looked like, they do this by asking all kind of questions, scanning the social media, online databases and everything they can get their hand on, to verify that you are not lying about your CV. Or at least, thatโ€™s what I understood when I read through the instructions.

I love the decline button, as if you really have the option.

I was quite surprised by the scope of the questions they wanted me to answer. Here in the Czech Republic, it isn't much common to ask so many questions, and I am pretty confident that they didn't have any legal permissions to ask some of them.

You see, business laws here are pretty strong and prevent your employer from asking intrusive personal questions. For example, your birth certificate is something they shouldn't ask from you. They can't copy your citizen ID, as the copying is illegal (they can ask for the number, but not the photocopy of it). And so on.

Similar forms are not just passports, but all kinds of ID.
โ€œWhen did you start living at this address?โ€ the question is somewhat offensive where I come from.

Suddenly, I had to provide all of this, and much more, to some random website. But I reasoned, that the company I want to work from is from the USA, so they maybe have different expectations, and I wanted the job, so I filled everything in.

That included:

It took me something like two hours to fill all of this in because the forms they use are really counter-intuitive, and the user interface is .. not great in some places. Also, I don't really remember all of this stuff, like the street number of the flat where I've lived five years ago. It took so long because they wanted everything in machine-readable format. For example, for the list of jobs, you have to fill in all kinds of information in structured manner, company name, IฤŒO (tax ID number), address, dates and so on. I had to google all of that.

I was annoyed because I am a busy person and taking several hours to fill in some stupid form isn't what I like to do in my spare time. But never mind. It took some time, but I filled all of that in and thought that I am done. As you can expect, that was not the case.

Next 14 days

Over the course of the next fourteen days, or maybe more, I've got a shit-ton of emails requesting all kinds of changes and updates and additional verifications.

They weren't happy with my high school name from the scan (which I filled in into the form) because they couldn't find it. Of course, they couldn't. My high school in the past ten years merged with another one, and it took the name of the second school. Why the fuck should I keep track of that? When I studied there, it was called as I filled into the form. The rest is their problem, as far as I am concerned. Then they weren't happy with the name of the field I've studied because it was probably no longer valid in some system, as it changed from Mechanik elektronik to Mechatronik, in the last 10 years.

Then they sent me this bullshit:

The dates of employment we have currently verified for your employer XXX s.r.o. differ from the dates initially submitted to HireRight. The original dates provided were 2018-03-01 - 2018-07-01 and the dates we were able to verify are 2015-06-23 - 2020-11-30. If the dates we have verified are not correct, we ask that you please supply us with clarifying documentation that indicates your correct employment dates (such as copies of employment contract, pay slips, tax documentation, work certificate, employment letter) to assist us in completing your background check accurately.
Please note that your employment with XXX s.r.o. was identified as self-employment and verified as such via online tool (rzp.cz). Please advise if any of the other employments, provided on the Application form fall under this self-employment as well. Thank you!

Well, of course. They are using an online tool, which can tell them that I am an identified contractor, to verify that I did a contract job for the XXX s.r.o. company. The dates don't fit because I am a contractor much longer, than I worked for the company. So, I had to upload scans of contracts.

Then I've got this monstrosity:

The dates of employment we have currently verified for your employer AAA a.s. differ from the dates initially submitted to HireRight. The original dates provided were 2018-09-01 - 2021-03-01 and the dates we were able to verify are 2020-12-01 - 2021-03-12. If the dates we have verified are not correct, we ask that you please supply us with clarifying documentation that indicates your correct employment dates (such as copies of employment contract, pay slips, tax documentation, work certificate, employment letter) to assist us in completing your background check accurately.
Please provide documentation verifying start and end dates of employment with National Library of the Czech Republic. Please note the documentation should include your name, company name and dates of employment. Acceptable documentation: signed copy of contract; signed contract termination or termination decision; signed contract annex, appendix, addendum; reference letter (signed by employer or issued on Company headed paper), tax documents, work certificate, employment/experience letter, pay slips. HireRight requires that the documentation issued by the employer has to be signed by the company representative where applicable. Please ensure that the documentation is issued within +/- 3 months from the actual start or end date. Please obscure any personal information that you consider to be confidential or that is not relevant to the performance of this verification.
Please provide an additional contact name, phone number and email address of an authorized party that is currently employed with National Library of the Czech Republic. This can be a Human resources representative, your former Line Managers / Supervisor who is currently employed with the company.
Please provide documentation verifying start and end dates of employment with XXX s.r.o.. Please note the documentation should include your name, company name and dates of employment. Acceptable documentation: signed copy of contract; signed contract termination or termination decision; signed contract annex, appendix, addendum; reference letter (signed by employer or issued on Company headed paper), tax documents, work certificate, employment/experience letter, pay slips. HireRight requires that the documentation issued by
the employer has to be signed by the company representative where applicable. Please ensure that the documentation is issued within +/- 3 months from the actual start or end date. Please obscure any personal information that you consider to be confidential or that is not relevant to the performance of this verification.
Please provide documentation verifying start and end dates of employment with YYY s.r.o.. Please note the documentation should include your name, company name and dates of employment. Acceptable documentation: signed copy of contract; signed contract termination or termination decision; signed contract annex, appendix, addendum; reference letter (signed by employer or issued on Company headed paper), tax documents, work certificate, employment/experience letter, pay slips. HireRight requires that the documentation issued by
the employer has to be signed by the company representative where applicable. Please ensure that the documentation is issued within +/- 3 months from the actual start or end date. Please obscure any personal information that you consider to be confidential or that is not relevant to the performance of this verification.
Please provide an additional contact name, phone number and email address of an authorized party that is currently employed with YYY s.r.o.. This can be a Human resources representative, your former Line Managers / Supervisor who is currently employed with
the company.
Please provide documentation verifying start and end dates of employment with ZZZ. Please note the documentation should include your name, company name and dates of employment. Acceptable documentation: signed copy of contract; signed contract termination or termination decision; signed contract annex, appendix, addendum; reference letter (signed by employer or issued on Company headed paper), tax documents, work certificate, employment/experience letter, pay slips. HireRight requires that the documentation issued by the employer has to be signed by the company representative where applicable. Please ensure that the documentation is issued within +/- 3 months from the actual start or end date. Please obscure any personal information that you consider to be confidential or that is not relevant to the performance of this verification.
Please provide an additional contact name, phone number and email address of an authorized party that is currently employed with ZZZ. This can be a Human resources representative, your former Line Managers / Supervisor who is currently employed with the company.

And I had to upload scans of contracts for basically all the companies, and search for people, who can verify my employment. Great. I didn't speak with most of the companies for years. Some of them were big institutions, where it's hard to get the right person. Moreover, most of the people I've worked with were no longer there. So, I just copied random numbers from the webpages and filled them in.

Conclusion

All the time, I was asking myself; what the heck does the HireRight actually do? They didn't verify anything. I had to upload everything myself, provide all the documentation and somehow, I even doubt, that anyone really looked at the documents provided. And how do you verify employment from a scan of paper I could have printed ten minutes ago?

I know that they didn't call at the numbers I gave them because they would meet a corporate labyrinth I couldn't navigate myself when I worked there, let alone actually get hold of someone to verify that I was employed there. Even if they didnโ€™t tell them to fuck off because they don't provide information about (former) employees to anyone who calls.

Anyway, I got that done, they finally "verified" all of my life and were happy, so they gave me approval.

Funny thing was, that after I've got into the company, I asked my new manager how the review went. And he just replied with blank face, that they don't care, they got just some email from the HireRight, but no one read it because they knew they wanted me since I've passed their interviews.

Great. All that work for nothing. And then I google and see this:

They didn't change a bit from 2017. I mean, what the hell is this company? It seems like truly useless provider of services they don't actually really do diligently. How much are companies paying for this? Was it ever helpful? Couldn't they just do this by themselves? Just ask me to bring the last six contracts, and you can look at them. You don't have to force me to hours and hours of dealing with some external fact-checker.

Other stories

Friend #1

I would just think that I had a bad experience. This can happen, of course. But several months after my experience, my friend got an offer from Microsoft. And when he passed all the interviews and necessary business negotiations (he even signed some kind of papers that was saying that heโ€™ll work there), they've sent him a HireRight form to fill. We expect you to start working here shortly, just this small formality, yes?

I've seen him struggle with HireRight for several months, fill in all the bullshit they want, and he is still not done. It almost seemed that he is finally done, they even sent some report to MS, but then they noticed that he didn't work anywhere for several years. And they completely deadlocked themselves.

I can see their thought train; how is this possible that our fresh wageslave took so much time just for himself? They just can't get it. He had to explain that not just once, but multiple times why he took a sabbatical because the mess there is simply too big for just one call.

Update

My friend didn't get the job. Let me rephrase that;

He passed all the interviews, he got the offer, and he quit his old job. And when he expected "last bureaucratic formality", he failed, and got rejected. He isn't really sure why. Maybe it was because he filled some date range wrongly on his LinkedIn. Perhaps it was because HireRight wasn't happy that he took a sabbatical. No one even told him why, so he is just guessing.

MS blacklisted him, they donโ€™t react to his emails and are not picking up his calls, and HireRight is also a wall of silence. But at least we now know that they really do something.

At the time of publishing this blog, my friend is still unemployed. And I expect that heโ€™ll have a hard time to get into any company which is using HireRight. All that, while he doesn't even know why.

Friend #2

Iโ€™ve recommended my other friend to the company where I am working on because he is a good programmer, and he was seeking employment. So, this time, I had a test subject, and I also asked him to provide some screenshots (the screenshots in this blogpost are from him, as I was not wise enough to create any when I went through the process).

For this friend, it took even longer (close to three months), and it was full of bizarre situations. Like when they requested that he proves he didnโ€™t commit any crimes while he was living in the Netherlands, several years ago. He had to give HireRight permissions to request some kind of letter from the Netherlands government, which took more than a month to arrive to the Czech Republic.

Or when they wanted him to upload Specific consent form:

That looks reasonable, doesnโ€™t it? Except that there is no link (you would say that the underlined First page - Specific consent form is a link to the document, wouldnโ€™t you? How naive.), you canโ€™t go back to the main menu because you donโ€™t have access there anymore (he got this like a month and a half in the process later). You only get a link via email, and when you open it, youโ€™ll get this page. So, he had no idea what is a Specific consent form.

In the end, he sent them this:

Which of course wasnโ€™t what they expected, and it took several calls to sort it out.

So anyway, after almost three months, during which he was already working in the company, he finally successfully finished the process. It took several tickets, several calls with guys somewhere from where they donโ€™t speak English very well, and countless uploads of various scans, but he got there.

This completely defies the purpose of HireRight, which I would guess is to screen the applicant for a job before you actually hire him. But at this point, it doesnโ€™t even surprise me.

What do you think? I think it was an excellent experience, in wasting the time of everyone involved.

Now I would like to know how to erase all my personal information, scans of my citizen IDโ€™s and all what Iโ€™ve uploaded, before someone hacks them and leaks all of that on the internet.

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