The Background Check on Your Next Hire Just Got a Lot Deeper… and Riskier
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Employers have always run a quick search on a candidate before extending an offer. What’s changed is how deep that search goes and how little it now costs to pursue it, according to reporting this week by The Wall Street Journal.
Screening firms now cross-reference dozens of platforms at once. Ferretly, one of the companies doing this work, counts Deloitte, Ally Financial, and BBDO among its clients. CEO Darrin Lipscomb told WSJ his firm used to reserve deep digital vetting for senior roles, since a scandal at that level does more damage to a brand. Some of his clients now run it on every customer-facing hire.
The tools reach further than most people expect. Facial recognition software can match the profile photo on an anonymous OnlyFans account to another image elsewhere online, and Ferretly reports the match to an employer once it’s at least 70% confident about who’s behind the account. Some companies pay for continuous monitoring of employees already on the payroll, not just candidates who haven’t started yet.
The twist most job seekers won’t expect comes from the opposite direction. RefAssured is building software specifically to flag candidates whose digital footprint looks suspiciously thin. Vinda Souza, the company’s CMO, told WSJ that when a hiring manager sees someone who clearly used to have an online presence and now has none, “that would invite inquiry.” A blank slate reads like a red flag: a bot, or something worth hiding.
Employers can afford to be picky right now, and that’s what’s driving all of this. With a deep pool of qualified applicants for a single opening, character becomes the tiebreaker, and AI made character cheap to investigate. A loose labor market created this level of scrutiny; AI just made it cheap to act on, the same dynamic behind how AI is already reshaping hiring decisions this year.
The continuous monitoring detail deserves more attention than it’s getting. A prehire check is a snapshot in time. Paying a vendor to watch an employee’s online activity after they’re hired is a different relationship entirely, and most workers have no idea it’s happening, or that a post from years ago could resurface through a tool their employer never told them about. States are starting to draw lines around AI’s use against workers on the job; California moved to protect AI-affected workers this year while Washington pulled back, and employer-side monitoring tools like this one seem like an obvious next target for that kind of rulemaking.
I talk with hiring managers every week about how they screen candidates, and two years ago, the online-presence question almost never came up outside of executive searches. Now it’s a routine part of the intake call, even for warehouse and call-center roles.
The advice at the end of WSJ’s piece sounds contradictory until you sit with it: don’t overshare, but don’t go dark either. A blank internet presence counts against you now, all on its own. The better move is to own your record. Know what’s out there, clean up what’s genuinely damaging, and put real professional material into the world so the story about you is the one you actually wrote.
One caution for the employers doing this: a 70% confidence threshold means roughly 3 in 10 flags could point at the wrong person. If you’re screening this way, put a human in the loop before a mismatched flag costs someone a job they were qualified for.
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Jobless Claims Fall to 208,000, But Manufacturing Layoffs Are Piling Up in the Data
Federal data released this morning showed 208,000 people filed new claims for unemployment benefits in the week ending July 11, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s weekly release. The figure is down 8,000 from the prior week’s revised total of 216,000, and well below the 221,000 filed in the same week a year ago.
The 4-week moving average, which smooths out the weekly noise, dropped to 214,250, a low number by any historical standard. It’s the same trend we flagged when claims sat near 205,000 back in the spring: employers still aren’t cutting jobs at scale.
Continued claims, the people who keep collecting benefits week after week because they haven’t landed a new job yet, came in at 1.8 million (1,805,000 seasonally adjusted), down 16,000 from the prior week and well below the 1.95 million (1,949,000) reported a year earlier. The insured unemployment rate held at 1.2%, where it’s sat for months and a tick below last year’s 1.3%.
Initial claims are the closest thing we have to a real-time read on layoffs, and right now they’re telling us employers are retaining the workers they already have. What I watch more closely is the continued claims side. When fewer people file new claims and the total collecting benefits keeps falling, it usually means people who lose a job are still finding another one fast. Continued claims climbing while initial claims stay flat is the real early warning sign for a hiring freeze. We’re not seeing that yet, and it lines up with what we said when the job market stopped getting worse back in May.
Three states account for most of the manufacturing pain this week. Missouri added 6,037 initial claims and Michigan added 4,458, both citing layoffs in manufacturing. New York added 4,587, citing cuts in transportation and warehousing, health care, and education, according to the Labor Department’s state-level comments.
These are the older, cyclical kind of layoff, tied to output and orders rather than AI-driven automation. The headline number is calm and the churn underneath it is ordinary, which matters if you’re hiring right now. People who already have a job are staying in it, so pulling a good candidate away from their current employer takes more than posting an opening and waiting. Employers are competing in exactly that kind of market right now, which is why many turn to staffing partners to move faster than a solo search allows.
