Why do you ask for social security numbers?

In this article, you'll learn why we ask for your candidate's social security number (SSN).

Having a candidate's social security number (SSN) allows us to accurately perform background check services on your candidate. While there may be more than one person with your candidate's name and birth date, their SSN is unique to them. It is often critical to have this identifier to search for information and accurately return information to you. For this reason, we recommend that an SSN be provided, even though some of our checks do not require one.

For US criminal record checks specifically, an SSN is required so that we can check that your candidate’s SSN is valid and generate the name and address history associated with that individual Having the SSN often leads to additional criminal history searches that provide a more complete picture of your candidate.

Additionally, our verification services require an SSN because it is often needed to pull employment or education history from many databases in the US. Likewise, credit checks require an SSN to pull credit history. In other cases, the SSN simply provides a unique identifier to help Certn ensure the maximum possible accuracy in our results.