Irvine-based Accurate Background credits its technology and service orientation for the company’s recently announced exclusive endorsement by two large California hospital groups—representing nearly 400 hospitals and 85 health systems in the state—for employment screening services.
The endorsement from the Hospital Association of Southern California (HASC) in Los Angeles and the Hospital Council-Northern & Central California provides both of their member hospitals with a comprehensive portfolio of employment screening, verification and compliance tools.
Accurate Background Chief Executive Tim Dowd told the Business Journal earlier this month that “healthcare background checking is a very sensitive area,” requiring rigorous screening efforts.
“The combination of our technology and our service orientation, where we have our customer service on shore in the U.S., able to address issues as they arise to create a much better candidate experience, made us a very good partner,” Dowd said. “Healthcare is a growth initiative for us.”
The HASC represents close to 180 member hospitals and 35 health systems, plus numerous professional associations and associate members, in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
The Hospital Council is a nonprofit hospital and health system trade association established in 1961, representing 197 hospitals and health systems in 50 of California’s most northern counties—from Kern County to the Oregon border.
“After a comprehensive review of background screening companies, HASC and Hospital Council jointly awarded endorsement to Accurate to help hospitals mitigate risk in their hiring process,” the two hospital groups said on Aug. 27.
Local Cluster
The company provides numerous pre-employment background check screening services, including criminal history, drug testing and driving records, employment verification, education verification and immigration-related work authorizations known as I-9 verifications.
Along with Irvine-based HireRight, it’s one of two Orange County-based firms that are among the country’s larger workforce screening companies.
HireRight says it “helps more than 40,000 companies hire great talent,” and announced late last month an affiliate had begun offering saliva-based COVID-19 screening tests to its employer customers.
Accurate Background says it has more than 16,000 clients across the globe, and that it conducts more than 25 million background tests a year.
Last year, the company was OC’s No. 17 on the Business Journal’s fastest-growing large private company list with an estimated $122 million in annual revenue as of June 30, 2019.
COVID-19 Effects
Technology has taken on more importance because of COVID-19, according to Dowd, as the shutdown hindered access to public records, basically the criminal records from affected local jurisdictions.
That means doing an initial search now but making sure that “your technology is such that you can keep track of candidates in a way where you can go back and fill in what information you may have missed in the initial search,” Dowd said. The candidate also has to be notified the search was not completed and that Accurate will be completing the report.
“It did require some flexible technology in the case management of each candidate to ensure that we could go back and bolster the record,” according to Dowd, who took over as chief executive of Accurate Background on June 1, succeeding founder and majority owner Dave Dickerson, who moved into the executive chairman role.
Dickerson founded Accurate in 1997 and helped it grow to over 1,700 employees. The leadership change followed Accurate’s acquisition of CareerBuilder Employment Screening earlier this year, on undisclosed terms.
Dowd lives in Northern Virginia but sees the company’s headquarters staying in Irvine especially now that the COVID experience has made the company “very comfortable with the remote work structure for almost every job in the organization.”
Dowd said in April he was confident the company will stay profitable this year with a strong balance sheet. He said that in a worst case, the pandemic may make 2020 revenue growth flat year-over-year as employment will continue to face a “headwind.”
