How Long Does A Background Check Take?

We all have moments of distrust in our lives and inviting a stranger into our lives is fraught with uncertainty. What if your latest online love interest has a criminal past or your new next-door neighbor is listed on the sex offenders’ registry?

This is why millions of Americans are turning to online background check services like BeenVerified. A background check is a safe and essential way to make sure the people in your lives are who they say they are. But running a background check to verify a person’s identity can take a lot of time and effort, as there are many different departments to contact. However, if you do a background check online, it may only take minutes!

Slow Sleuthing and Sluggish Searches – How Long Does it Take for a Background Check

So, how long does a background check take? While you don’t have to use a background check service to unearth someone’s past, if you’ve ever tried doing a free background check yourself, you’ll know that it isn’t quite as simple as you might think. A search engine like Google will produce some results but, if you want to find out if your new neighbor has ever committed a crime or if your new roommate is liable to run off without paying the bills, unearthing the relevant information can be a time-consuming and arduous task.

Getting information about sex offenders registered in your area is quite quick, thanks to the free Family Watchdog site, but accessing criminal records is another story entirely. Even though the information you most urgently want to get your hands on is, most probably, anything pertaining to a criminal past, in order to get that, you first need to find out where the individual you’re investigating lived so you can approach the correct state or federal court.

Once you’ve managed to work that out, you then need to complete the necessary forms and make the required payment, which is a minimum of $15 per request. After all that is done, you’ll have to wait around one to three working days before you receive a response.

So to answer the question, how long does it take for a background check, already, this process will have taken you nearly a week which is roughly how long a pre-employment check takes for a professional Consumer Reporting Agency to complete. Not only has it cost you more in time than a paid background check service, but it has also probably cost you more money as well. At $15 per request for a court document, if you ask for two or more, you’ve already spent over $7 more than you would have spent on a month’s subscription with BeenVerified.

Surprisingly, online background checks like those offered by TruthFinder can be completed in a matter of minutes or even seconds! Although this does affect the accuracy of the results to some extent, it also means you can breathe a sigh of relief much sooner because you have the proof of your new friend’s innocence in your hands.

How Long Does a Background Check Take?

To do a background check on someone using BeenVerified, all you really have to do is enter their first and last names and the state they live in, assuming you have all that information. After that initial investment of a few seconds, you may need to take a couple more seconds to answer a few questions, after which you can sit back and relax as BeenVerified begins building its report.

Five minutes into the process and the report is already complete, now all you need to do is sign up and make a payment. This is also extremely straightforward, taking just a couple of minutes to complete, after which you can read through your report and find out whether this is someone you should welcome into your life or someone you should steer clear of.

So, what took us nearly a week to achieve independently, took less than an hour with one of the best background check services around. Is it any wonder, then, that around 100,000 people use BeenVerified on a regular basis or that TruthFinder conducts somewhere in the region of nine million searches each month?

Inevitably, not every background check service can produce accurate results quite so quickly, so if you’re in a hurry, you should opt for one of the best background check services for fast and accurate results. Although the list below is by no means exhaustive, these three services are at the top of their game for reasons we’ll explore further in the next section.

Best Background Check Services

#1 BeenVerified

One aspect of the best online background check services is that you can use a variety of search criteria to uncover the mysteries of an individual’s past and true identity. For example, with BeenVerified, you can opt to do a reverse phone number or email lookup so the only information you need to enter is the contact data you have available. Say you’ve been receiving a series of nuisance calls from the same number, you can enter that number into a BeenVerified search and find out who it belongs to.

If you require a more in-depth report that involves premium services like the BeenVerified court runner service, you’re going to have to be prepared for a considerably longer wait. According to BeenVerified, a court runner will take up to 30 days to produce results, depending on which county the court is in. While Nevada tends to be very prompt in its processing of clerk searchers, other counties such as Merrimack, New Hampshire can take over 25 days to complete the process.

This may sound rather time-consuming and it is, but, in most instances, a standard report is more than sufficient, giving the super sleuth behind the background report access to a wealth of information, including their current contact details, address, work and education history, civil and criminal convictions, bankruptcies, social media profiles and relatives and known associates.

BeenVerified guarantees that a basic background check will take just a matter of minutes or even seconds, depending on how much information is available on the individual being investigated. If you do need more information about a person’s past mortgages or previous misdemeanor convictions, you’ll need to commit a little more time and patience to the process.

Affordable, accurate, and timeous, BeenVerified is the best way to dig up a person’s past and put your mind at rest so why not try it out today, digging up some dirt on that new mom who wants to join your carpool or scoping out your latest online love interest.

#2 PeopleLooker

While a TruthFinder people search will prompt you to input more information so it can correctly select the right individual according to the name you’ve given, PeopleLooker simply produces a list of all the people with that name, allowing you to select the correct one. This appears to make the whole process go a little faster and, while PeopleLooker is busy building the report, it’s also busy making suggestions about other people you might like to search, encouraging you to make the most of your subscription.

PeopleLooker is pretty transparent when it comes to fees which is a welcome approach as some background check services tend to lure consumers in, enticing them to pay more for information they may not really need.

If you’re something of a hypocrite and want to keep your own data private even while rummaging around in someone’s virtual underwear drawer, PeopleLooker’s commitment to user privacy will appeal. Like both BeenVerified and TruthFinder, PeopleLooker has a range of apps available for users to download to their smartphones and other mobile devices. This makes performing background checks almost too tempting and you may find yourself unwittingly searching everyone you know and their next door neighbors!

Certainly, PeopleLooker knows how to get you hooked and even if, like me, you had no intention of paying for a subscription, when the first hints of what the report will contain appear online, it can be difficult to maintain that resolve.

PeopleLooker may not be as thorough as TruthFinder or as fast as BeenVerified but it is, nonetheless, a great way of finding out more about a person or just tracking down an old school friend. Its customer support isn’t up to much but, then again, it’s background check functions are so simple, the average user should be able to complete the process without any assistance.

#3 TruthFinder

Although TruthFinder takes a little longer to build a full report than BeenVerified does, it will inform you of the level of accuracy before you make a financial commitment. In fact, one of the most likable things about TruthFinder is the amount of information it shares with you during the report building process.

Not only does TruthFinder’s prompts make for a faster turnaround time and a more accurate end result, but they also make you feel more involved in the process and enable you to share additional details that other rival background check services do not.

For example, during the process of building a test report, TruthFinder prompted me to answer a number of questions, as well as whether or not I suspected they had a criminal record.

Another nice touch from TurhtFinder which isn’t available with BeenVerified is that you can view a sample report online so you know exactly what information you’ll be getting and how it will be presented.

A little more expensive than BeenVerified, TruthFinder is nevertheless competitively priced. Like most online background check services, Truthfinder does warn its users that the information they uncover could be disturbing, especially if they’re looking up a close relative or friend. For example, while building the social media section of the report, a pop-up will appear warning that the subsequent report may contain  “potentially embarrassing online profiles”. Presumably, this means you could find your husband has a profile on Footfetishmatch.com for example or, worse still, Diapermates.com!

While neither as accurate nor as fast as BeenVerified, TruthFinder is a reliable service that’s easy to use and gives you a comprehensive set of results presented in a compact and comprehensible report. The more information you can enter, the faster and more accurate the service becomes. It even rates its levels of accuracy prior to purchase so you can opt out if it doesn’t live up to your expectations.

As the old saying goes, when performing a background check with TruthFinder or any service, you should “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst”. Hopefully, whatever the report reveals, it should enable you to make the right decisions in order to keep you and your family safe and connected.

 

Conclusion

If you’re worried that your husband has an embarrassing social media profile out there somewhere or you’re trying to organize a school reunion and can’t locate all your old classmates, a background check service will produce results in a fraction of the time it would take you to rustle them up independently.

With the best background check services producing comprehensive reports in a matter of minutes, putting your mind at rest over a new person in your life has never been easier. Of course, services like BeenVerified aren’t only there to help protect you against untruths and fabrications, but also for the good things in life, like reconnecting with a lost relative or locating your high school crush.

Regardless of what you want to with a background check or who you want to check out, we recommend BeenVerified as the fastest and most accurate background check service available. If you’re not convinced, though, why not explore our findings on the best background check services before making a commitment.