Faster Verifications, Smarter Hires

Speed has always mattered in hiring, but today, it’s a competitive differentiator. At Collaborate 2026, First Advantage hosted a series of focused, closed-door sessions with customers and guests to explore how organizations are accelerating hiring without increasing risk.¹ Verification speed is no longer just an operational metric. It is now central to hiring success. Drawing on those conversations, this blog explores how leading organizations are rethinking verification processes to move faster while maintaining confidence and compliance.

The growing pressure to complete verifications faster

Organizations are under increasing pressure to hire quickly, especially in high-demand industries like healthcare, transportation, and technology. At the same time, expectations around confidence and compliance are rising. This creates a challenge: hiring teams need to move faster, but traditional verification processes often slow them down.

Common challenges include:

• Long turnaround times from manual outreach to employers and institutions
• Incomplete or unverifiable candidate information
• Increasing reliance on costly third-party data sources

The result is a bottleneck that impacts time to hire, candidate experience, and ultimately business performance.

At Collaborate 2026, many organizations shared a similar realization that improving verification speed is about working differently. To address these challenges, organizations are focused on three outcomes: hiring smarter, onboarding faster, and managing verification costs.

Smarter workflows are driving better results

One of the biggest shifts discussed at the event is the move toward optimized verification workflows. Instead of relying on a single source or process, modern verification strategies use a layered approach to improve success rates and reduce delays. According to one senior talent acquisition leader at a U.S. healthcare staffing organization, “By optimizing our verification workflows with First Advantage, we achieved a 99% primary source verification success rate while reducing delays and manual effort. This has significantly improved both speed and confidence in our hiring process.” ²

These workflows typically include:

• Intelligent routing to the best available data source
• Use of proprietary databases to complete verifications faster
• Increased outreach attempts across multiple channels
• Early use of candidate-provided documentation to support primary source verification

Early results show improvements, including up to an 8% increase in primary source success rates.² This multi-layered approach is designed to increase completion rates while minimizing manual effort.

Why completion rates matter more than ever

Incomplete verifications often fall back to internal teams, increasing workload, introducing risk, and delaying hiring decisions. By improving completion rates upfront, organizations can reduce downstream inefficiencies and maintain consistency in their hiring processes.

Automation is reshaping verification speed

Another major takeaway from Collaborate 2026 is the growing role of automation in accelerating verifications. Solutions like instant employment verification are changing expectations. Instead of waiting hours or even days for confirmation, organizations can now retrieve key employment data in seconds.

For example:

• Present employment verification can be completed in as little as 30 seconds
• Candidates securely connect to payroll providers to confirm employment details
• No credentials are shared, and only job-related information is retrieved

This shift speeds up hiring and also improves the candidate experience by reducing friction and follow-up requests.

Proprietary data is reducing reliance on third parties

A key driver of both speed and cost efficiency is the use of proprietary verification data. Traditional verification models often rely heavily on third-party providers, which can introduce delays and rising costs. Third-party verification fees have increased significantly, with some estimates showing increases of more than 600% in recent years.

By leveraging proprietary databases built from verified employment and education records, organizations can complete verifications faster and reduce dependence on external providers. These databases continue to grow at scale, enabling more verifications to be completed instantly or with minimal manual intervention.

Managing cost without sacrificing speed

Speed improvements also directly affect costs. At Collaborate 2026, many organizations highlighted the rising cost of verifications, particularly when relying on third-party sources. However, newer approaches are helping to offset these increases.

By combining automation, proprietary data, and smarter sourcing strategies, organizations are seeing:

• Reduced out-of-pocket verification costs
• Lower reliance on high-fee providers
• More predictable and scalable screening programs

First Advantages proprietary database, Verified!, now exceeds 100 million records and continues to expand. It helps reduce out of pocket verification costs as well and increases the speed of verifications.

Speed and trust are no longer tradeoffs

Perhaps the most important takeaway from Collaborate 2026 is that speed and trust are no longer competing priorities. They are built together through smarter verification strategies. With the right approach, organizations can:

• Verify candidate information more quickly
• Improved completion rates
• Reduce operational burden on internal teams
• Deliver a better experience for candidates

This represents a shift from traditional thinking. Instead of choosing between speed and risk mitigation, leading organizations are building verification strategies that support both.

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