In April 2026, Bchex commissioned a national survey of 153 U.S. HR and hiring leaders. The first question was one the category never gets asked directly: how would you describe your relationship with your current background screening provider?

The answer didn't fit what either side of the relationship probably expects.

Three in five HR leaders described the relationship as something other than loyalty. The other 41% — the ones who would recommend their vendor — turned out to be just as open to alternatives. Sixty-eight percent of them are still planning to evaluate a new provider in the next 12 months.

In most vendor categories, that distribution produces churn. In this one, 81% of buyers have stayed with the same provider three years or more.

The numbers don't reconcile unless you accept that long stays in background screening are not what they look like.

Stuck by design

If 59% of HR leaders aren't loyal, and 75% are open to evaluating an alternative, why does 81% tenure look like 81% tenure?

The survey asked. Only 5% of HR leaders said nothing was stopping them from switching screening vendors. The other 95% named structural barriers. The top reasons, by share who selected each in their top two:

• Cost of switching and setup fees: 44%
• Time and effort to transition: 42%
• Currently under contract: 33%
• Internal approval bureaucracy: 19%
• Fear a new provider won't deliver: 18%
• Disruption to integrations: 15%
• Don't know enough about options: 14%

Notice what isn't on the list. "We like our vendor." "The relationship is working." "We don't see a reason to leave." Those answers exist in the data. They form the 5%. The other 95% describe a different reality: leaving is expensive, complicated, contractually constrained, or risky in ways that staying is not.

Long tenure in this category is not a signal of a relationship that works. It is a signal of a relationship that costs more to end than to continue. Setup fees, multi-year contracts, integration friction, auto-renewal clauses. Each of these is a small piece of structural retention. Together, they buy years of revenue from buyers who would otherwise leave.

That isn't a moral claim. It's a description of how the category's economics work.

The promise gap

Here is the variable that does the most work in predicting what HR leaders will do next.

Fifty-eight percent said a screening provider had failed to deliver on what was promised during the sales process. Twenty-nine percent said the failure was significant. Another 29% said it was somewhat the case. Only 31% said their provider delivered what was promised. The remaining 11% weren't involved in the original selection.

Among the 58% who report a sales-promise gap, 89% say they are likely to evaluate a new provider in the next 12 months. The full sample sits at 75%.

A failed sales-stage promise is the single strongest predictor of evaluation intent in the data. Not turnaround complaints. Not price sensitivity. Not platform frustration. The specific experience of being told something in a sales meeting that didn't hold up afterward.

The shape of the complaint in the verbatim responses is consistent enough to summarize:

These aren't accusations. They are the four categories of complaint that appeared most often in the survey's open-ended responses, distilled. Some buyers got one of these. The 29% who said the failure was significant got more than one.

The 89% figure matters because it reframes the cost of every future evaluation a vendor walks into. Three in five buyers carry a prior bad experience into the next pitch. Three out of every five chairs at the table belong to someone whose default assumption is that the new vendor will also let them down.

What HR leaders are actually choosing on

A brief detour into the choice itself, because the answer is counterintuitive.

Ask HR leaders what they expect from any screening vendor as a baseline, and accuracy dominates. Fifty-six percent rank it first. Price comes last at 8%.

Then ask what actually drives the decision to stay with or switch a provider. Platform and technology usability tops the list at 61%. Customer relationship quality follows at 54%. Compliance guidance for the buyer's specific industry comes in third at 44%. Price ranks seventh of eight, named by 20%.

Buyers in this category are not choosing on price, and they don't expect to. What they are choosing on — platform usability, the human on the other end of the contract, compliance support that actually fits their industry — is the same set of capabilities the report shows the category under-delivering on most.

This is the gap the campaign is built around. Buyers know what they want. Most of them are paying for something else.

What to do with this

If you've read this far, the question worth asking isn't whether your current vendor is good or bad. The data above shows that even buyers who would recommend their provider stay open to alternatives 68% of the time. Satisfaction is not predictive of much.

A sharper question: if the cost of switching were zero, would you still be with your current provider?

For 41% of HR leaders, the answer is a clean yes. They're loyal and would recommend. For the other 59%, the answer is harder. Some would stay because their vendor is good enough and switching is genuinely complex. Others would leave the moment the friction dropped, and have been waiting for the right moment for years.

Either answer is fine. What isn't useful is conflating the two. Long tenure with a vendor you'd leave if it were easy is not loyalty. It's inertia priced into the relationship.

Three questions worth running on your current vendor:

1. What did the original sales process promise that hasn't been delivered? Pull the SOW. Compare line by line to what's actually happened in the last 12 months. If the gap is small, the vendor is probably worth keeping. If it's specific and material, the gap is the relationship.
2. What does your hiring team work around rather than work through? Spreadsheets to track stuck checks. Manual emails to chase updates. Login workarounds. Each workaround is a platform gap the vendor never fixed.
3. If switching were free, would you still be here? If the answer is anything other than a clean yes, the friction is doing the work the relationship should be doing.

Three questions, 30 minutes, no sales call required.

Frequently asked questions