How to run a background check on someone (2026 guide)

The first background check I ran on a job candidate took four days and about $300. I filled in a form for an agency, waited, chased them twice, and got back a PDF that told me roughly what I already knew from LinkedIn. That was a few years ago. The process has got faster and a lot cheaper since, and the biggest change is that you can now do it yourself in about the time it takes to make coffee.

Start with what you already have

You need less than most people assume. A full name plus one solid identifier will get you a match most of the time. The identifier is the part that does the work: a phone number, an email address, a date of birth, a last known city. Any one of those drags the search out of guesswork.

Two men called James Miller in Ohio are indistinguishable on a name alone. Add a phone number and they become seperate records straight away. An SSN gives you the tightest match available, but for a general check you rarely need one.

Where should the details come from? Ask the person. If you are hiring, the application form is the right place. If you are vetting a contractor, the quote or the invoice usually has a phone number and often a business address. Don’t go building a profile off someone’s Facebook — besides everything else, it is the least reliable data you will find.

Running it

Enter what you have, pick the country, wait. How a report is built goes through what happens behind the scenes, but the short version is that the search fans out across identity records, court and criminal filings, address history, and the phone and email trail attached to the person.

Most reports come back inside two minutes. Some take longer, usually when court records have to be pulled from a slow county system. If you are running several people at once — three candidates for one role, say — do them in one sitting. Differences between reports jump out far more clearly than they would a week apart.

Reading the result without over-reading it

You get a headline verdict first: Clear or Review.

Clear means nothing surfaced against the identifiers you gave. Review means something did, and a human needs to look at it. This is where people go wrong. Review is not a verdict. I have seen Review triggered by a name shared with someone else in the same state, by a fifteen-year-old traffic matter, and once by a person who turned out to be the victim in a court case rather than the defendant.

So read what the record actually says. Check the date on it. Check whether the name matches all your identifiers or only one of them. Then decide.

Address history is worth a slow read too. A gap, or a sudden jump between states, is not suspicious on its own — people move, people rent, people go and look after a parent for a year. It is the sort of thing to raise in a conversation, not to quietly draw conclusions from.

Where the line is

This part matters more than the rest of it put together.

A person report is for general information. It is not a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and you cannot use it to decide on employment, housing, credit or insurance. For any of those you need an FCRA-compliant screening provider and written consent from the candidate, and there is no clever way around that. Background checks for small business covers what that looks like in practice if you are hiring.

What a general check is genuinely good for: confirming the person in front of you is who they say they are, before you hand over a deposit, a key, or your home address. That is a real problem and this solves it.

Two minutes, roughly thirty dollars in credits. If you want to see what the output actually looks like, verify someone you already know the answer for. It is the fastest way to calibrate what Clear and Review really mean.

Sources & further reading: KYC and identity verification  ·  Background checks have changed — what it means for small business  ·  Our data platform