The sharing economy is revolutionizing how we do business. Yet for all its modernity, peer-to-peer sharing just doesn't work without trust.  This means showing the steps you're taking to establish integrity and trustworthiness across your community.

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Transcript:

Kevin: For more information on our solution for powering marketplaces, go to www.near-me.com. Check out features. Check out the testimonials. There’s a lot of great information in there.

Hi. Welcome to The Crowd, a podcast by Near Me. We’re talking about peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re talking collaborative economy and we’re talking about thought leadership. We’re talking about all these things, any and all of them with some of the best minds in the field. And of course, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen.

I’m super excited about today’s interview. Today, I’ll be joined by Jennifer Franklin from First Advantage. First Advantage is one of the largest providers of background checks in the collaborative economy. Yes. They work with Uber, Airbnb and some of the other big guys. We’re going to learn a lot about trust in communities in this conversation. Let’s jump at it.

Hi. I’m your host, Kevin Cohen. I’m super excited about today’s interview. Today, I’ll be joined by Jennifer Franklin. Jennifer is the Senior Vice President of Sales in the collaborative economy solutions group at First Advantage. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Jennifer: Thanks for having me.

Kevin: Before we jump in to our discussion on the collaborative economy and specifically about trust, I’ve got some rapid fire questions I’d like to ask you.

Jennifer: Okay.

Kevin: What book do you recommend most often?

Jennifer: There are a couple of books that I recommend and they’re not necessarily always in the business space. But one that I really like is the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

Kevin: Aha.

Jennifer: And another one more on the personal side, I love Yes Please by Amy Poehler. I think it’s hilarious. And then one other one, I’m a big fan of Sheryl Sandberg so Lean In for any men or women who are looking to get to that 50-50 place in their relationships.

Kevin: Awesome. So what peer-to-peer marketplace or sharing economy services do you like to use?

Jennifer: Oh, there’s quite a few. So I’m Canadian and I moved to San Francisco about four years ago. So while I’m here in San Francisco, I use Uber, I use Lyft, UrbanSitter, Rover, Desks Near Me, Airbnb, Thumbtack. Yeah. A ton of them. So when I leave San Francisco and I can’t have access to some of them, I get frustrated because they’re pretty amazing.

Kevin: Totally, totally. So when you’re not working, what do you like to do with your spare time?

Jennifer: Well, I have a 2-year-old and so I love spending a lot of time with her. We travel a lot as a family. We go back to Canada a lot. We travel as much as we can. And we get out with our dog and we hike around the San Francisco area, the Bay Area. And we definitely spend a lot of time in Wine Country around here.

Kevin: So give us your back story. What did you do before you joined First Advantage?

Jennifer: Yeah. So I started my career as a developer. I started very early on probably about, oh my gosh about 15 years ago now. And I realized as I started my career and I’m a developer that I actually didn’t want to be a developer anymore but I really still, I love technology. So very quickly, I decided “how do I get on the front side of software?” And so that’s where I got into the sales side and I worked for an HR outsourcing company many years ago. I’ve been pretty much in the HR space or the human capital space for most of my career. And I moved to a company called Taleo in about 2008, 2009 in Toronto and spent a year there and I would say honed my skills on human capital and sales before I decided that it was time for a change and went and started with a small company in Toronto called I Love Rewards at that time which was rebranded to Achievers.

I started with them to head their sales team. And I really helped grow that company to be able to offer rewards and recognition, technology to enterprises, organizations across North America. I started there in Toronto and then I ended up going to Boston to help them open up the office there and then eventually out here to San Francisco. And I realized after five years in a startup environment and great success that it was time for me to try something new and that’s where I ended up joining First Advantage and leading their collaborative economy space as they’re trying to develop this new and absolutely booming area. So that’s my back story.

Kevin: Well, let’s get a little bit more granular. I mean, specifically, how is First Advantage dipping their hands in the collaborative economy, in the sharing economy?

Jennifer: Yeah. Well First Advantage, they’re the largest global data-driven background screening company in the world and so – First Advantage has been around for a number of years. Most recently, they kind of came together, three different companies, LexisNexis, First Advantage and Verifications, Inc. And that essentially made them the biggest in the world and really has allowed us to have a global scope for our customers. So any of our customers who have employees globally, then we can do criminal checks and verifications essentially anywhere in the world. What we realized when – actually it was our investor STG, Symphony Technology Group, they were really hyper-focused on the collaborative economy. And of course, you can see the way that it’s expanding and the need for trust within these communities.

And so traditionally, First Advantage really has been focused on employers and in screening typical employees. But what I am doing and First Advantage is focused on now is “how do we help each of the customers within this space build that layer of trust so that more people adopt the technology, more people adopt or are willing to adopt and use whether it’s someone else’s home, someone else’s car, hire a babysitter, hire a tutor, let someone take care of their dog?” And as this industry is just expanding rapidly as we know, First Advantage really does have quite an advantage in their history in the space and their global scope in being able to help each of these customers as they expand globally.

Kevin: Very cool. What are some of the marketplaces or collaborative economy properties that you guys are working with currently today?

Jennifer: So if you’re familiar with the Crowd Companies honeycomb, there’s really – I mean, it just keeps expanding. And so we really have a focused eye I’d say in six specific categories there. I’m really focusing – we’ve had customers in the learning space, in the services, transportation, home sharing and services I really put in there. We talked about nannies and child care and elder care and pet care. Health care is a big expanding one for us. And so we have a ton of customers. Specifically, I would say the biggest one for us that we see is really around the services side on tutoring and child care. And then of course, we work with some of the largest names in the whole collaborative economy with working with Airbnb. And then on a global scale, we work with Uber.

Kevin: Nice. So let’s talk about trust within communities. Many of the industries in the collaborative economy are unregulated. What are some of the things that your clients are doing to protect their members and make it a more transparent and safe environment for their customers?

Jennifer: It’s been really interesting to see the different industries do different things with a level of trust. So when we deal with our customers in the transportation industry, what they’re willing and wanting to do in terms of building in layers of trust is going to be very different than what our customers in the child care, elder care or even pet care space are doing. And so even though there’s not a lot of regulation – and again in each of the different verticals, it does vary a little bit. It’s really up to the individual company to decide what is right for them. And where we see our customers who are really successful, they’re the ones that are building in more trust and more screens, background checks than the other ones.

So a lot of companies come in to the space maybe due to financial reasons or just not knowing, there’s not a lot of depth to the screens that they’re doing. It could be a very simple check, a database search versus a company who has been doing this for a long time and understands the strategic value that it can bring to the organization and how it can be a competitive differentiate for them. And so for our customers in what we call the child care space, we certainly see a high level of depth going into these screens but not necessarily as deep as they could go. So I’m part of a mom’s group here in San Francisco. And part of the group, there is this forum. And a lot of the moms on the blog, they ask the question “what exactly is included in a background check?” And we’re seeing there’s not a lot of consistency.

And so moms and dads and people in the community are putting trust into these sites saying “okay, this individual has been background checked. I guess they’re okay.” But what does that actually mean? And so we’re starting to see as these companies evolve and they want to stand out among their competitors, they are doing much, much more in-depth background checks and verifications than they did before. Now, I came in to this industry and I didn’t know a lot about background checks. I know a lot about technology. I know a lot about the collaborative economy but I quickly learned that there is a huge variance between what you can do and what level of trust you can build into your communities which is incredibly interesting.

And every time I talk to a new customer, we’re seeing that dependent on the industry, they want to go deeper but it’s also balanced with we’re used to using these technologies now. That gives us a quick response, a quick answer, a quick hire. And by going to a deeper level of checking someone’s background, that is going to delay that interaction a little bit. So it’s balancing that interaction of okay, I want to give this immediacy to the person who wants to hire someone versus giving a really high level of background check where we have to send a court runner to the actual court to check something out. So very interesting things happening and really dependent on the different verticals that are in play.

Kevin: Very cool. Quick question. There’s obviously the approach of whether or the question of “should you go deeper or lighter?” But also I’m sure there’s a question of frequency because obviously people create – someone could have a background screen and then six months later they could get caught doing a crime. And at the beginning of it, their background check was clear but obviously if it was run on a consistent basis, the new offense would show up. Are a lot of these marketplaces doing frequent background checks on the same candidates? Or are they typically only doing it at the beginning when the person’s hired?

Jennifer: That’s such a great question. So it’s something that we encourage, doing as frequent monitoring as possible. And that’s exactly to your point because the day that you get the screen, that’s as good as it could tell because tomorrow that person can go out and do something. And that screen or that check no longer is as valid as you would’ve hoped. It’s valid to the point that you get it but the next day again, of course it wouldn’t be as useful. So depending. So the transportation industry, we’re finding a lot of monitoring on motor vehicle reports. So that’s something that we see much more frequent now. But a lot of it depends on the legal counsel of each of our customers. Our direction is always this information is as good as the day that you get it. We hope that it is valid for up to 30 days but we do recommend that you do a monitoring every 30 days so that if anything gets flagged or will come up, you can look into that information in more detail.

By doing that, it does increase the trust. But again, it’s also the balance of people being able to get that information, being willing to do it. So it’s the consent side of things as well. Will the people that have signed up consent to have the background checks done every 30 days or have a screen done every 30 days? And then cost associated with it. So a lot of the customers that we’re dealing with are maybe startups and they just don’t have the funds to be able to put that into place. So most frequent, what we’re seeing is an annual rescreen. We’re not seeing it as common as right now that people are doing it as frequently as every 30 days.

Kevin: Okay, okay. Are there different – are there ways of doing a hybrid solution? For example like doing a deep screen once every year, every six months and then a lighter screen after that. I mean, are there some custom solutions that are out there? Or is it pretty much you have to just choose a level and you stick with it?

Jennifer: No, absolutely. There’s a lot of flexibility and I think that’s one of the things that our customers really like about us. It’s that there are lots of flexibility in terms of frequency and in to what you screen for. So you can do an initial deep dive screen and then on an ongoing basis do a much more high level. For our customers who just want to do an annual screen, we’re certainly not going to go rescreen seven years back after the first year because we already did that the year before. So we try to put those cost savings in for our customers. And also, it depends on – there are lots of different levels of what we call the screens.

You can go just do a high level database search which is what’s speeding us from the county courthouses but keeping in mind that not every county has a database that will feed into these national databases. They don’t have the technology set up. And that was one of the things that was really surprising to me. So some of our customers, they want just very high level. And then other customers as they go down the road, they may want something a little bit more in-depth once they make the decision to hire someone to either tutor their child, take care of their child. Or if they’re renting a home, at that point, they may do a deeper screen.

Kevin: So let’s flip the switch here a little bit. So obviously from a compliance standpoint, background screens are critical. How are companies using background screens as a marketing element? Obviously, they could put a badge that says each person is certified. They could also do a variety of other things. How is it used to attract new customers and make them feel safe when coming in to make a purchasing decision?

Jennifer: Yeah. Well, most of the customers that we see who utilize background check services, if they have a really deep dive screen going on, then they promote that. They promote the fact that they do a national criminal, they do a national sex offender, they do a county search that goes deep into someone’s history or a seven-year search. And for those customers especially depending on the industry that you’re in, that’s really important. As a mother, that’s really important to me. That’s something that as parents, they want to see if they’re going to allow their child to be tutored or taken care of. For companies that are in the transportation industry, it’s really important for the community to know that not only is MVR, motor vehicle information going to be covered but the people that they’re getting in a car with, do they have any kind of conviction? We’ve seen too many examples of people getting hurt.

And we know that by deeper screens and going into court level and to county court level, you’re going to find information that isn’t ideal necessarily but is going to help your community. And that’s how they’re helping, that’s how they’re using it from a marketing perspective. It’s really about protecting the community. And for them, it’s protecting their brand. Uber has taken a hit a little bit in the last year because of some of things that had happened. And so they took the steps to put in place a higher level screen so that they don’t have as many of these incidences. And that’s something that is really helping them. And most of our customers who are a couple of years into their business, they get it. They can afford it and they’re doing it and it’s helping them grow.

Kevin: Very good, very good. Well thank you. I appreciate that. For listeners who are looking to learn a little bit more about First Advantage and the different solutions you have in the collaborative economy, where can they go to learn more?

Jennifer: They can go to our website. So go to fadv.com. And there is a particular page focused on sharing economy. So if you go right there, then you’ll learn about our solutions. And then our team would love to speak to anyone about the different levels of solutions that we can offer both domestically and globally.

Kevin: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer, for joining us here today. It sounds like you guys are doing some great stuff at increasing trust and transparency in the sharing economy. And we will make sure to have all of your information in the show notes below this podcast so that people can get in touch with you about their concerns, questions and looking at your solutions to help them.

Jennifer: Great. Thank you so much for your time, Kevin. And I really appreciate it.

Kevin: Wonderful. Thanks so much, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Thanks.

Kevin: So that’s it for today’s show everybody. I’d like to thank Jennifer from First Advantage for joining us here today. They’re doing great stuff so check them out. If you want to learn more about First Advantage and Jennifer, we’ve got all of their information in the show notes at www.near-me.com. Click on the blog and then go to the podcast listing. Also, if you like today’s show, we’d really appreciate it if you could go to iTunes and leave us a five-star review. It really helps. Also make sure to subscribe to the podcast while you’re there. Thanks and make it a great day.