The FRS Story
If you're reading this, odds are you already know: background screening has become exponentially more demanding, and more consequential, over the last decade.
Why is that? We believe there are at least three core reasons worth calling out.
First, compliance has fractured. Beyond the FCRA, there are now hundreds of state and local rules (ban-the-box ordinances, clean-slate laws, record-access restrictions) that change what a CRA may report, where, and how. A check that was routine fifteen years ago now touches a dozen jurisdictional rules.
Second, hiring has accelerated. Offers go out in days, not weeks, and employers judge their screening partner on turnaround above almost everything else. Every hour a report sits in a queue is an hour a candidate might accept another offer.
Third, candidates expect consumer-grade software. They apply from a phone, sign on a screen, and abandon anything that feels like paperwork. A confusing intake form is now one of the most common reasons a check stalls.
Thirty years at the front of screening
FRS didn't arrive at these problems recently. We were there when the industry was born. In the mid-1990s, when most CRAs ran on fax machines, phone calls to county clerks, and paper files, we built one of the first digital processing systems for background screening: software that tracked every search from order to final report.
The first FRS system
A database-driven processing platform for CRAs at a time when "software" in screening meant a spreadsheet. Orders, searches, and reports in one place for the first time.
Screening goes online
Web-based client ordering and status tracking. Employers could place an order and watch it progress without a phone call.
The integrations era
Connections to the first applicant tracking systems and automated routing to vendors, court runners, and labs. Re-keying data started to disappear.
Mobile-first candidates
We rebuilt candidate intake around the phone. Average completion time fell from six minutes to three, and drop-off fell with it.
The modern FRS platform
A rebuilt cloud platform where candidate experience, processing, compliance, and reporting are one system, carrying thirty years of screening know-how into the next thirty.
Carving a path to Background Check Excellence
As a result, excelling at screening has become a strategic advantage for CRAs. The agencies winning the largest employer accounts aren't just faster. They are more accurate, more transparent, and easier for candidates to deal with. The gap between how screening was done in the past and how the best CRAs operate today is striking.
While the term lacks a formal definition, we see the best screening teams aim to excel at all of the below (and often much more):
Candidate experience
How quickly and clearly do candidates move through intake and disclosures? How many finish on the first try?
Accuracy & compliance
How defensible are your reports? How consistently are jurisdiction rules applied across every search?
Turnaround time
How predictable is your delivery? Where do searches wait, and does anyone know why?
Client visibility
Can employers see status in real time, or do they call to ask? Are they in the loop on delays?
Vendor & court orchestration
How much of your routing is automatic? How well are runners, labs, and data vendors managed?
Fulfillment efficiency
How many touches does a report need? How much of your team's day is spent on work software should do?
The age of screening operations
To meet these demands, CRAs are building out screening operations as a discipline: dedicated people focused on process, tooling, and vendor strategy, much the way sales and marketing operations matured a decade earlier. They know that investment in a strong foundation pays off many times over.
We've spent thirty years inside those operations. We've watched fulfillment teams work around software instead of with it: juggling vendor portals, copying data between systems, and chasing candidates who never finished a form. Every one of those workarounds is a gap in the platform. We became convinced that closing those gaps is the whole job.
What we've set out to build
We went back to CRA owners, fulfillment leads, compliance officers, and the candidates themselves, and came away with a clear conviction: the industry needed a platform built for how screening works now, not for how it worked when the first systems were written.
What we've built is a single system where the candidate experience is not a bolt-on but the front door of the platform. Intake, compliance rules, automated routing, QA, and delivery all share one record, so data flows without re-keying, and everyone involved can see where a check stands. We built all of it with an operations mindset: for teams who want to configure their workflows, not work around them.
Why FRS?
How FRS enables Background Check Excellence
Screening has changed and so should your tools. Our approach to building FRS centers around ambitious screening teams that question the status quo:
We've designed FRS to:
To help you achieve:
Where we are today and what's next
The modern FRS platform is live with CRAs processing checks every day, and, cliché as it is, we're just getting started. Over the past few years we made deep technical investments in a platform foundation, and we've worked closely with screening teams to refine every module on top of it.
We're already seeing CRAs that adopt FRS fully become uniquely enabled by the product: faster turnaround, cleaner reports, and candidates who finish what they start. Our plans going forward are simple, if not easy: keep delivering the level of service our customers know us for, and keep building the platform that makes Background Check Excellence the norm rather than the exception.
Say hi!
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading, and for being part of this journey. If you'd like to see FRS run a check end to end, we'd love to show you.