How To Assess a Match on an Adverse Media Check

This is one the trickiest areas of background checking, which you have to use some detective skills to assess the match. It's possible to get false positives in this type of checks, since we're searching public registers searches, publications and websites. Due to this, candidates can just be matched on location, name, and birth year. Your first action is to understand if this is your candidate in question, or if it's a false positive. 

Your steps:

1. Navigate the website linked on the report to search for your candidate's name.
2. See if the candidate's personal information (name, date of birth, address/location) is the same as the one's in the websites in the matches
3. Look at the Zinc report, or ask your candidate for evidence for of the time period shown on the matches (where they were living/working).
4. If you can't disqualify your candidate, understand if this is acceptable.

If it is your candidate, you can now assess the severity of the findings.

What if the Link in the Report is Broken?

For these types of checks/matches, we rely on our downstream providers (external sources) who conduct searches against various lists based on the applicant's information. We return all the information we receive from them. When service providers scrape a webpage, the content becomes accessible, and this data is used to generate match results. Unfortunately, the internet evolves over time, and a publisher may remove a page or move it to a different URL. We currently have no way of tracking these changes, as websites do not notify us of such updates. As a result, we are unaware when these changes occur.