Candidate Stories allow candidates with records the opportunity to share additional context about themselves and their background checks directly through the Candidate Portal. Once submitted, these stories will be available to customers in the candidate’s report in the Checkr Dashboard.

Candidate Stories will help your adjudication team comply with Ban the Box and fair chance regulations by providing them with the ability to collect relevant supplementary information from candidates, which is a required step in the adverse action process in many jurisdictions.

For more information on using the Checkr APIs to create and retrieve Candidate Stories, see Candidate Stories.

Candidate Stories in the Checkr Dashboard

Use the Checkr Dashboard to request and review Candidate Stories.

• From the Report, adjudicators can ask candidates to share additional information by clicking on the Request Candidate Story button in the Actions section.
• Use the Tag field on the Candidates page to search for candidates who have submitted additional information or who have been asked to share their story. Checkr will automatically assign a “candidate-story-requested” and a “candidate-story-submitted” tag to these Reports.
• Use the Account Settings page to set your notification preferences for submitted candidate stories. By default, notifications will be issued to adjudicators for any candidate stories submitted before Pre-Adverse Action.

Note: Create a single email account to allow your adjudicators to build a unified queue of incoming Candidate Stories. This allows companies to better manage the Candidate Story intake process. To funnel notifications of submitted stories to a single account, create a new user with an adjudicator role, and set their email address to the desired mailbox. Then, set that user to receive notifications of candidate stories submitted before any Pre-Adverse Action notification is issued.

Once a candidate has posted their story, the story and any uploaded supporting documentation will appear in an Additional Information section with the referenced record in the candidate’s Report.

This feature is enabled by default for all Checkr Customers. If you do not wish to allow your candidates the chance to share their story through this feature, please work with your Checkr Customer Success representative to disable it for your account.

Candidate Experience

Candidates will receive an email requesting them to log into the Candidate Portal, and provide any additional context or supporting documentation they wish to provide.

Once logged in, they will be asked to select whether they wish to provide general information, and/or select a specific record they wish to address. They are then provided a screen in which they can add their story, and upload any documents they wish to provide.

The Candidate Portal makes it clear to candidates that reviewing their submissions is up to the customer and cannot be guaranteed by Checkr.

Reviewing this content and clicking Send will add it to their report, display it in the Dashboard, and send notification to any customers who have chosen to receive these notifications.