Traditional background screening is broken. Riddled with bias, incompleteness and lacking an official process, background checks are missing nearly half of available data about an individual.
That’s leading to businesses risking expensive bad hires, and their wider company reputation. There are emerging disruptors in the market, but how do they compare with the ‘old guard’?
Here, I want to take a deep dive into what businesses are blindly accepting as background screening now…and what businesses should be expecting. That’s smarter and more efficient screening that builds sophisticated connection mapping, bringing you a more comprehensive understanding of a candidate while avoiding risk of bias, as well as saving you and your business significant time and money.
This isn’t a far-off future—AI background screening is transforming disparate data overloads into usable intelligence. It’s not AI data vomit—just pure, data-driven insights that won’t leave anything overlooked.
So if your hiring process is feeling a little ad-hoc, ‘that’ll-do’ or simply not fit for purpose in the digital recruitment environment, it’s time to think differently about how to do things.
The problem
In 2025, traditional background screening doesn’t work effectively anymore. With companies missing as much as 40% of vital information about an individual they go on to hire, the risk of unwanted information coming to light far too late is costing UK businesses billions. The problem? The traditional process of background screening candidates is broken, and no longer able to pick up on the nuanced content relating to individuals in the digital sphere.
According to a 2024 co-study by the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Rutgers University, the majority of widely-used background checks are innately faulty. Professor Robert Stewart found that:
"There are lots of inaccuracies and mistakes in background checks caused, in part, by imperfect data aggregation techniques that rely on names and birth dates rather than unique identifiers like fingerprints."
- Professor Robert Stewart, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice
In other words, the background checks that most recruiters, employers and landlords use to verify if somebody is who they say they are actually neglect a huge pool of information, by relying almost exclusively on the knowledge the person already has about the individual. If the person has changed their name (perhaps to distance themselves from a criminal record or negative press), or assumed a new identity online, it can be exceptionally difficult for these types of background checks to pick up on this data.
Another issue preventing businesses from knowing who they are hiring? Simply not having the time or resources to conduct thorough background research, as well as introducing bias into the hiring process by incorporating the biases inherent in Google’s algorithms into a candidate report.
The sheer volume and duplication of information potentially available about an individual is another barrier to background check accuracy. High-profile events or incidents may result in heavily duplicated content that dominates the first pages of search engine results, neglecting equally or more important information to know that sits further down (through search algorithm or purposeful pushing down of negative content*).
*Yup, this is a thing.
The solution?
So if it’s there online, but we can’t find it using traditional screening methods, what can be done?
On the plus side, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people to hide who they are or conceal information if they interact with online content on a regular basis. The apps we use, websites we visit and social media platforms we share on have become extremely sophisticated in profiling individuals, usually with the intent of targeting personalised ads at users.
But because traditional background screening methods often rely solely on information provided by the searcher, a huge amount of important data relating to online activity risks being missed.
It’s time to completely rethink the process of how recruiters and employers screen potential hires. Absolute diligence and prevention is key, and only achievable by integrating advanced screening methods into the recruitment process at multiple stages.
YOONO is a new generation background screening tool that places itself as a disruptor in this long-unchanged industry. Using AI technology to screen publicly available data online, YOONO is able to provide a GDPR-compliant background screening service that covers more bases than both conventional search engines and traditional background checks.
A YOONO report helps recruiters and employers to:
Save time, with each report taking minutes rather than hours to process innumerable items of data.
Reduce bias, by using intelligent insights to prioritise information based on data not algorithm or opinion.
Streamline research into one work flow, standardising the hiring process and cutting out unnecessary apps and services.
Build a bigger picture of a candidate’s network through connection mapping, which identifies related people and companies, spotting commonalities and connections.
See the wood from the trees with smart summaries that present an ‘at a glance’ synopsis of a candidate, that strips out sentiment and reveals hard facts.
The future of screening…revolutionised
You may be thinking, “Why would I change my current background screening process, if it works just fine?”.
The unfortunate truth is that shortly into the future traditional background checks won’t be ‘fine’. There is too great a volume of information already being chronically overlooked in recruitment, not just on social media but across other online content such as press, blogs, forums and videos. People are being placed into roles that they are unsuitable for, risking the reputation of the businesses that hire them, simply due to the fact that crucial information relating to them is being easily missed by ‘old guard’ screening methods.
High-profile stories surrounding online reputation checks are increasingly highlighting the fallout from not using these types of screening methods to identify bad hires.
Search online and hope for the best? Employers simply can’t risk bringing individuals on board who have shared inappropriate content or are the subject of adverse media online. With conventional search defined by clickable algorithms, biased data is taking precedence and must-know information is being pushed down the search pages.
Bring clarity to the screening process
With a tool like YOONO, you can bring back clarity into the screening process. No more blind searching. No more scattered research. No more risk to reputations. Everything visible in one place, with pure data giving you the confidence that you’re hiring the right person for the right role.
If you’re ready for the future of background screening, start with a YOONO search today and see where it can take you and your business.
