HireRight Review

Hiring a bad apple can cause all kinds of problems for any company. That’s why employers use sites like HireRight to vet candidates before hiring them. If you’re the hiring manager for a medical practice, for example, a HireRight criminal background check can help you weed out candidates who could pose a risk to your company—and your patients. 

But there’s value in running a background check on companies that provide background checks. That’s why we’ve taken a deep dive into the pros and cons of HireRight.

HireRight Compared

HireRight did not land a spot on our list of the best background check companies. Instead, we suggest GoodHire as the best choice for SMBs because of its quick, reliable, and wallet-friendly services. Run your first background check with GoodHire for just $29.99.

• Intelius — Best for unlimited background checks
• GoodHire — Best for flexible pricing and intermittent use
• B&B Reporting — Best for next-day background check results
• Accurate — Most affordable background checks for small businesses
• VeriFirst — Best background check service for property management companies

Learn more about each of these excellent services in our list of the best background check companies. 

About HireRight

Whether you’re looking for driving record checks, criminal background checks, drug screenings, or even financial background services, HireRight does it all. The company advertises its services to a variety of industries, from hospitality and manufacturing to government and financial services—and more. 

• HireRight Background Check Company Review

It also claims to be ideal for self-serve, small, midmarket, enterprise, and global clients. The HireRight resource library comes with a variety of articles that delve deeper into the way background checks can help you navigate the hiring process in different industries. 

HireRight Health and Stability

In October 2021, HireRight officially became HireRight Holdings Corporation, a publicly traded company on the NYSE under the stock symbol HRT. The company has been around in some form or another since about 1990. 

Along the way, HireRight merged with background screening company General Information Services (GIS) and acquired PeopleCheck, J-Screen, and BackTrack. These acquisitions have likely helped HireRight widen its pool of services offered. But mergers and acquisitions are stressful events for employees and company leadership alike, and they can affect company stability and decrease shareholder wealth.

In total, HireRight has acquired five companies—three of them within the years since 2018. Still, the company’s been around for several decades, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. 

HireRight Pricing

When it comes to pricing, we appreciate businesses that make it easy for customers to find pricing information. Unfortunately, HireRight does not make it easy to know the costs of its services. We did some digging and found some pricing information, but not nearly as much as we’d like. 

HireRight Pricing Structure

HireRight doesn’t list its prices anywhere on its website. If you want to use one of HireRight’s services, you have to select the service and fill out the appropriate form to get in touch with HR’s sales team.

For HireRight’s self-serve background screening services through Backgroundcheck.com, pricing for a one-time package begins at $33.15 for a criminal record check, SSN validation, and sex offender registry check. Results are instant. For a county-level search in addition to these searches, you’ll need to pay $49.95 and can expect results within one to three days. A multi-county search costs $69.95.

HireRight Pricing Comparison

A criminal background check, SSN validation, and sex offender registry check in your local county costs $49.95 with HireRight’s Backgroundcheck.com service. This is close to the same price as GoodHire’s mid-tier package, which costs a one-time fee of $54.99. 

However, GoodHire gets you more features for your money: an SSN trace, sex offender registry search, global watchlist records check, national criminal records check, and criminal search in as many counties as you want. 

Accurate’s mid-tier AccurateNow package, meanwhile, costs $62.05 per report plus a one-time $25 setup fee. You get an SSN trace, address history, 7-year criminal history, a national criminal check with county verification, a global watch check, and a national sex offender registry search.

So while HireRight costs slightly less than competitors, it offers fewer features for the mid-tier price. 

HireRight Trials and Guarantees

HireRight has no free plans, free trials, demos, or customer guarantees. In addition, it has no refund policy—something that has contributed to some of its negative customer reviews. 

HireRight Background Check Company Review

Whether you need an extensive criminal history or a driving background check, HireRight offers both of these services and more. You’ll need to reach out to the HireRight sales team for most of these services but you’ll get to enjoy them at the enterprise level. 

SMBs can benefit from HireRight’s sister site, the affordably priced Backgroundchecks.com. While HireRight offers an impressive suite of services, it may have bitten off more than it can chew. Our research unearthed a worrisome amount of negative customer reviews. For options with more reliable services, see our top list of the best background check companies.

What Makes HireRight Background Check Company Great

• Ease of use: It’s never fun to wade through a complicated website, especially when you’re trying to perform serious tasks like background checks. With its intuitive website navigation and clear directions for HireRight is easy to use. The main menu is uncluttered, and four of the five menu items—Services, Industries, Resources, and Company—feature a drop-down menu that makes it incredibly easy to find exactly what you’re looking for. A prominent search bar helps out if the menus aren’t quite enough. There’s also an unobtrusive top menu above the main menu with easy links for customer sign-in, customer support, and help for job candidates who are being screened. 
• ATS integrations: Employers who use this service praise HireRight’s ATS and personnel management integrations. The list of integrations is impressive, and it includes companies like ADP, BambooHR, Click Boarding, DriverReach, EBE, Greenhouse, JazzHR, Jobvite, Oracle, SmartRecruiters, UKG, and Zoho Recruit—to name a few. With these integrations, you can seamlessly bring your HireRight screening process into your preferred ATS software. If you use JazzHR, for example, you’ll start the background check process from within JazzHR. JazzHR will then push the request to HireRight, which reaches out to the candidate—while keeping the employer in the loop—and requests the necessary information and authorization from the candidate. HireRight then updates the status on JazzHR, and the final results can be accessed via a link on your JazzHR dashboard. 
• Affordability: Even though it’s difficult to access pricing information for HireRight unless you contact the sales team, our research suggests that HireRight’s custom packages are affordable. The benefit of custom packages is that you don’t pay for what you won’t use. When you speak with the sales team, they’ll help you determine which services you need, and each item is added to your package individually.

Where HireRight Background Check Company Falls Short

• Long waits: The reviews we studied from pre-COVID times praised HireRight’s quick turnaround times for screenings and background checks. In the post-COVID era, however, the company appears to be struggling with producing results on time. This issue may be related to the instability COVID-19 wrought on just about every facet of society, along with the 2022 labor shortage. It’s also possible that HireRight’s merger with General Information Services and its acquisition of three additional background check companies may be contributing to the slower processing speed. As the dust from these upheavals begins to settle, users may find that wait times improve. 
• Poor customer support: Dozens of customer reviews highlighted a common theme: that HireRight needs to work on its customer support offerings. Users reported sitting through hour-long hold times before giving up, having to call customer support about the same issue multiple times, experiencing dropped calls with no callbacks, and getting no responses to emails. Pandemic-related upheaval may be partly to blame for this. But recent reviews for GoodHire, a top HireRight competitor, praise GoodHire’s quick and helpful customer service, showing that building a robust customer support team is still possible for companies like HireRight.
• Candidate experience issues: While HireRight does well at making the employer experience a positive one, it seems to leave a lot to be desired when it comes to the job candidate’s experience. Quite a few reviewers complained of having to put in a lot of time and effort just to comply with the background checks required for their new employer, sometimes to the point of delaying their start times for new positions. 

HireRight Background Check Company Compared

We believe there’s potential in HireRight’s services, but it’s not our top recommendation for a background check company—that title goes to either Intelius or GoodHire for both companies’ reliability, speed, and affordable pricing. 

• Intelius — Best for unlimited background checks
• GoodHire — Best for flexible pricing and intermittent use
• B&B Reporting — Best for next-day background check results
• Accurate — Most affordable background checks for small businesses
• VeriFirst — Best background check service for property management companies

Final Verdict

HireRight helps companies vet their employees and volunteers, offering an array of services from criminal background checks to drug screenings. The company’s wide range of services is admirable, and with time, we may see HireRight emerge as a top player in the future.  

For now, however, we do not recommend HireRight. Instead, we recommend checking out the five companies on our list of the top background check services.