An adverse media search provides you with a list of the online publications, date, article extract covering the key details and the reference to your applicant’s name. If the publication includes any information such as the candidate’s address/age/date of birth, this may also be provided.

You would then review each article to determine how it relates to your applicant and how it might affect your recruitment decision.

Important to know:

• If an applicant has a very common name, there may be hundreds or possibly thousands of results returned for you to review.
• You may not be able to quickly and easily differentiate your applicant from another person with the same name, especially if there are hundreds of articles presented to you for review.
• For this type of search to be valuable and effective, you would need to allow sufficient time to review all the articles presented to you and balance that against your timeframe for recruitment and the level of risk involved in recruiting them without having this type of search carried out.
• No matter how many articles are presented to you for review, you will need to consider the context of each mention of their name carefully to be able to make a proper decision about how the mention relates to your applicant’s appointment.
• It can be exceptionally difficult to verify the author and veracity of articles that appear on the Internet because false and fake information can be published quickly and easily.