Candidate stories allow candidates with records an opportunity in the Candidate Portal to submit additional context about their records and self-improvement efforts they’ve made. After a candidate submits their story, you can read it in their report in the Checkr Dashboard.
Candidate stories help your adjudication team comply with Ban the Box and fair chance regulations. This feature enables your adjudicators to collect relevant supplementary information from candidates, which some jurisdictions require as part of the adverse action process.
Checkr enables this feature by default for all customers. If you don't want to offer your candidates the opportunity to share their story through this feature, work with your Checkr Customer Success representative to disable it.
Note
You can use the Checkr APIs to create and retrieve candidate stories.
Request candidate stories in the Checkr Dashboard
To request a candidate story from the Checkr Dashboard, open the report and click Request Candidate Story in the Actions section. Candidates can also submit stories without you requesting them.
The Tag field on the Candidates page shows candidates who submitted additional information or who you've asked to. Checkr automatically assigns a tag below to these reports:
- candidate-story-requested
- candidate-story-submitted
Notifications
Use the Account Settings page to set your notification preferences for candidate story submissions. By default, your adjudicators receive notifications for candidate stories submitted before the pre-adverse action process begins.
Note
To better manage the candidate story intake process, your adjudicators can share a queue of submissions:
- Create a new user with an adjudicator role, and set their email address to the desired mailbox.
- Set that new user to receive notifications of candidate story submissions.
After a candidate submits their story, the story and any supporting documentation appear in an Additional Information section in their report. After you read the candidate's story, you can mark it as read.
Candidate experience
Candidates receive an email inviting them to log in to the Candidate Portal and submit additional context or supporting documentation if they want to.
After the candidate clicks the Share Your Story link and logs in, they decide whether to provide general information or address a specific record. The candidate can then add their story and submit documents.
The Candidate Portal makes it clear to candidates that you, the customer, decide whether to review submissions and Checkr can't guarantee that you will.