The background check hasn’t changed much in decades. A criminal record search, a reference call, maybe a credit check – and yet the risks employers actually face have moved somewhere else entirely. Workplace harassment, threats, intolerance and misconduct now leave observable traces online, long before they ever show up in a court record. At the same time, AI has made it trivially easy to fabricate an identity – a polished CV, a deepfake video interview, a candidate who exists only in the aggregate of a language model.

So what does the next generation of screening actually look like when identity, behaviour and personalisation converge?