What a 38-Year HR Veteran Looks for in a Background Check

HR Agent runs HR end to end for its clients, from payroll and benefits to policy and employee coaching. Most of those clients are private equity portfolio companies. Christopher Hudson is HR Agent’s CEO, and Emelda Bates, Managing Director of Human Resources and Operations, has worked in HR for 38 years.

HR Agent gets called when things go wrong. Most new clients arrive after their HR team has quit, or after the most senior HR person left and took someone with them.

Clients in crisis. “We may have two days to get their payroll done,” Emelda says. Any vendor HR Agent relies on has to work without anyone checking on it.

A steady stream of acquisitions. Private equity clients keep adding companies, each with a 100-day plan to get fully running. “100 days sounds like a long time,” Emelda says. “It’s not.”

Reports that only look right. Many clients come to HR Agent with a screening provider already in place, and some of the results Emelda sees are thin: “What comes back is one line of data.” Her question for any provider: “They’re going to give you information that’s going to look right. But how do you know?”

Pressure to go faster. Back when checks took three to five days, clients would ask for one or two. Emelda’s answer was always the same: “Do you want good or do you want fast?”

A side-by-side test. HR Agent first heard about Bchex from a mention and decided to run two background checks at the same time, one through a competitor and one through Bchex. “The competitor came back with zero hits. Bchex came back with four,” Emelda says. “So you tell me.” After that, HR Agent took all of its clients to Bchex.

Reports with real depth. When an early report came back, a colleague brought it straight to Emelda. The person had lived in a lot of different counties, and the report covered them in a level of detail the team hadn’t seen from a screening provider. “We tried you,” Emelda says. “And then our minds were blown.”

Screening that belongs to the client. HR Agent sets its clients up on Bchex directly, so the relationship stays with the client. “If we ever go,” Emelda says, “we still want you to keep the business.”

A person who knows the account. When one client setup stalled on paperwork, Emelda asked for her account executive, Michael Kinard, and he took it from there. “He has sold you over and over with me to customers when I needed it,” she says. Setting up a new client today is “pretty quick, pretty easy.”

Fast, too. For years, Emelda told clients to choose thorough over fast. Today, about 85% of eligible Bchex searches come back within 24 hours.

More than 12 years in, HR Agent still sets up every new client on Bchex. The most recent joined in September 2026.

Thorough checks haven’t cost HR Agent’s clients their hires. “We usually don’t lose candidates,” Emelda says. “They just assume you’re being thorough.”

Emelda has repeated the side-by-side test for clients. When HR Agent took over a hospice client, it ran checks through the client’s existing provider and through Bchex at the same time. Bchex returned a much more thorough report, and the client moved to Bchex. “It was a no-brainer,” she says.

CEO Christopher Hudson points to the same depth. “There have been a large number of instances where Bchex offered us background data that was not shared by candidates, or even in some cases denied by candidates, but was, of course, proven to be valid when we asked Bchex for further detail,” he says. Every time HR Agent vets candidates for a client, it tells the client how much it relies on Bchex.

When a record is in doubt, she says, Bchex will send someone to the courthouse in small towns where electronic files aren’t available. “It just doesn’t get any better than that.”

For roles where someone works inside another person’s home, she’s blunt about what matters: “If somebody’s going into somebody else’s home, I care more that I get the right person. Because if you get the wrong person, the cost is too big.”