PolicyNexus

Background checks find records. PolicyNexus determines relevance. It operationalizes the hardest part of adjudication—the nexus between a record and the risks of a specific role—and applies it consistently at high volume.

PolicyNexus transforms existing background check outputs into clear, consistent, and defensible hiring criteria by doing three things:

Normalize: convert inconsistent charge/disposition data into a standard structure
Nexus: apply job-specific relevance rules based on role exposures and offense families
Narrate: produce an audit-ready explanation tied to your policy version and evidence

What PolicyNexus provides

When a record appears on a report, PolicyNexus answers: “What does this mean for this job, right now, under our standards?”

PolicyNexus gives your team:

A single place to build and manage policies (instead of spreadsheets and tribal knowledge)
Job-family specific standards (drivers ≠ finance ≠ in-home access)
Consistent decisions across reviewers and geographies
A defensible explanation you can hand to Compliance, HR leadership, or counsel

The problem: policies drift, but legal expectations don’t

The biggest adjudication risk isn’t that teams lack policies—it’s that their policies don’t scale. A single, outdated matrix gets applied to every role, and reviewers are left to “fill in the nexus” manually—creating inconsistency, delays, and decisions that are hard to defend.

Policies become outdated remnants with unclear rationale
A single one-size adjudication matrix gets applied across every job
Manual review becomes the default—slow, inconsistent, hard to scale

That’s not just inefficient—it creates risk from both directions, because job relevance analysis is inherently role-specific.

Risk #1: Over-exclusion

Blanket exclusions are hard to defend when they aren’t tied to job duties. The EEOC has long emphasized targeted screening logic that considers (1) nature/gravity, (2) time elapsed, and (3) nature of the job (often called the “Green factors”), with many programs incorporating an individualized assessment step.

Today, individual states and even cities increasingly make this operational: for example, Los Angeles requires a written individualized assessment that links specific criminal history to risks inherent in the job duties.

Risk #2: Under-screening

The opposite failure is just as real: generic policies can cause truly job-relevant risks to get glossed over—especially in roles involving home access, vulnerable populations, driving, or financial access.

Negligent hiring claims often hinge on foreseeability and whether an employer used reasonable care in hiring for positions that create predictable risk to the public.

PolicyNexus is built to reduce both risks at once: job-specific logic + consistent execution + documentation you can actually defend.

How PolicyNexus works

1) Make records policy-readable

Accurate data doesn’t always mean usable data. Charge text, severity labels, and dispositions vary wildly even when they mean the same thing.

PolicyNexus normalizes report artifacts into a structured evaluation view:

Charge taxonomy (consistent categories so policies don’t depend on abbreviations)
Severity markers (e.g., felony/misdemeanor where available)
Disposition normalization for evaluation (e.g., “judgment outcome” vs. “non-judgment / unresolved”)

Why this matters: CRAs are designed around FCRA obligations—like maintaining “reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy” when preparing consumer reports.

PolicyNexus is built for employer evaluation, so your logic can focus on job relevance and clear rationale rather than CRA operational constraints.

2) Apply nexus-first rules (job relevance)

PolicyNexus helps you encode what defensible programs already aim to do: link conduct signals to the risk inherent in the job.

You define:

Role exposures (driving, in-home entry, vulnerable populations, financial access, sensitive data, etc.)
Offense families mapped to exposures (impaired driving → driving roles; theft/fraud → financial access; violence → vulnerable populations, etc.)
Time windows + escalation logic (recency, repeat patterns, “review required” triggers)

3) Explain decisions (audit-ready outputs)

Every PolicyNexus result includes:

Rule trace: what matched (and what didn’t)
Reason codes: plain-language “why,” tied to duties/exposures
Evidence summary: the normalized inputs used (taxonomy, severity, disposition, dates)
Versioning: policy version + template lineage + change log

This is the difference between “the policy said no” and “here’s the job-relevant rationale we consistently applied.”

Templates + jurisdiction overlays

You can start from templates grounded in common relevance frameworks, then tailor by job family and risk tolerance.

And because state/city compliance is increasingly where the complexity lives, PolicyNexus can support jurisdiction-aware outputs/overlays—so reviewers don’t accidentally apply the wrong window or standard.

Example: Philadelphia is a strong example of why this matters: Bill 250373-A amends the city’s Fair Criminal Record Screening Standards ordinance.