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Your guide for background check decisions
HireSignals
As an adjudication team, you’re responsible for some of the hardest decisions in hiring.
When a candidate is flagged, the stakes are real:
Get it wrong, and safety or compliance is at risk
Be overly cautious, and you risk losing qualified candidates and recruitment spend
Move too slowly, and hiring grinds to a halt
You’re asked to make fast and compliant judgments with limited context or support tools.
Misconceptions of risk
Most background check systems treat risk as static: a past conviction appears, and it’s assumed to reflect present risk.
But decades of criminology studies show something different: risk changes dramatically over time—and it can be measured.
Yet most screening tools don’t reflect that reality, leaving your team to fill in the gaps with intuition, manual review, and conservative guesswork.
It’s not beneficial for you, your business, or your candidates.
Kizuna combines policy automation with science-based risk insights to deliver a more complete and defensible evaluation of candidate risk.
Meet Your Risk Guide: HireSignals
HireSignals was built to give background check teams the tools and context needed to make smart, fast, and defensible decisions when candidates are flagged for review.
We don’t ask you to trust a black box. We give you transparent signals grounded in real-world data, so you can make confident decisions that lead to the outcomes you desire.
How it works
When a background check is flagged by your criteria in PolicyNexus [link to page], HireSignals supports your team through the two steps every defensible decision requires:
A clear, evidence-based assessment of risk
Relevant context from the candidate
Together, these enable proper, individualized assessments without slowing your team down.
Risk signals
Our risk engine—developed in collaboration with leading criminologists and economists—evaluates candidates by comparing their profiles to historical reconviction outcomes for individuals with similar characteristics.
It relies exclusively on factors that research has repeatedly shown to be the most reliable indicators of future behavior:
Our risk engine—developed in collaboration with leading criminologists and economists—evaluates candidates by comparing their profiles to historical reconviction outcomes for individuals with similar characteristics.
It relies exclusively on factors that research has repeatedly shown to be the most reliable indicators of future behavior:
Time since last conviction
Candidate age
Pattern of behavior, including total conviction count
Severity of convictions
The result is a clearer, more accurate picture of what risk looks like today.
To make these insights immediately actionable, teams can set risk thresholds that define what constitutes acceptable risk.
This allows adjudicators to interpret reconviction signals quickly and consistently, reducing variability across reviewers and speeding up decision-making—while preserving human judgment where nuance is required.
Candidate Context
Risk signals provide clarity but context completes the picture.
HireSignals makes it easy to collect relevant information and documentation from candidates through a digital, candidate-centric questionnaire—designed to replace the outdated, error-prone PDF forms many teams still rely on today.
This step is required in many jurisdictions, yet historically it’s been slow, manual, and difficult to manage. HireSignals modernizes the process, reducing unnecessary friction for both teams and candidates.
Each questionnaire is pre-customized and approved by your team, ensuring the right questions are asked, the right disclosures are included, and responses are collected in a consistent, auditable way.
Flexible, Automated Triggers
Teams can control exactly when and how candidate context is collected:
Manually trigger a questionnaire for specific candidates under review
Automatically send questionnaires based on defined conditions, such as when candidates are flagged by PolicyNexus or above a configured risk threshold
By automating context collection where appropriate, teams eliminate unnecessary back-and-forth, while giving adjudicators the context they need to make fair, informed decisions.
Stronger Signals. Better Outcomes.
Our risk assessment models are developed alongside criminologists and labor economists analyzing millions of criminal records across multiple jurisdictions.
HireSignals doesn’t replace human judgment—it sharpens it.
By combining evidence-based risk signals with structured candidate context, HireSignals enables teams to:
Move beyond gut instincts and conduct data-informed individualized assessments
Understand why a candidate may present higher or lower risk
Resolve flagged cases faster, with greater consistency
You’re no longer forced to choose between safety and opportunity or speed and fairness. HireSignals helps you make the call—backed by data, guided by expertise, and aligned with how risk actually behaves. This means faster resolution and more confidence in the decisions that follow.
Take Action
Keep the talent you worked so hard to win
Limit rejections to real risks and turn recruiting costs into lasting hires