Pre-Employment Background checks are no longer enough as workforce trust risks escalate.

Employers are moving away from only using pre-employment background checks as fraud, identity risks and more complex workforce models push screening further across the employee lifecycle. That's according to the 2026 Global Workforce Trends Report from First Advantage.



This trend is being driven by the growing scale of risk facing businesses. The global study found that 76% of hiring managers have experienced falsified employment details during recruitment, while 45% have encountered candidate identity misrepresentation. Candidate verification issues have also been reported by between 71% and 88% of employers worldwide, turning trust from an isolated recruitment concern into a wider workforce risk.



The findings come at a time when AI is becoming increasingly embedded across recruitment and onboarding. The report found that 90% of CHROs have implemented some form of AI within their recruitment processes, while concerns around document forgery, deepfakes and identity-related fraud continue to rise.



This shift is set to accelerate. Almost nine in 10 employers (89%) plan to introduce additional background screening and identity verification solutions within the next two years, while 52% of surveyed CHROs are periodically rescreening and 30% continuously monitoring employees as part of their workforce strategy and considering expanding both.



To explore what these trends mean in practice, First Advantage has launched Know Your People, a new podcast series examining how hiring, verification and workforce trust are evolving in an increasingly digital and AI-enabled world.



Commenting on the findings, Rolf Bezemer, Executive Vice President and General Manager at First Advantage, said:



"The research highlights a significant shift in how employers think about trust. Candidate misrepresentation, increasingly complex workforce models and widespread AI adoption are creating challenges that many hiring processes were simply not designed to address.



“What's particularly interesting is that trust concerns now exist on both sides of the hiring relationship. Employers are concerned about hiring the wrong person, while candidates are increasingly worried about job scams, identity theft and sharing personal information online.



“The conversations taking place through Know Your People reflect what many employers are experiencing today. Questions that were once confined to background screening teams are now being discussed at board level because trust, identity and risk have become business issues rather than purely recruitment issues.”





Ends



Press contact



Vickie Collinge

Vickie@bluesky-pr.com

+441582 790705



About the research

The 2026 Global Workforce Trends Report was conducted in partnership with ClearlyRated and includes responses from 2,148 HR professionals and hiring leaders and 3,244 job candidates across five global regions and nine industries. The study examined evolving attitudes towards hiring, workforce trust, identity verification and background screening.