What 200,000 verifications taught us: how often applicants stretch the truth, who controls the database layer, and how to finish a check fast.
From "a human on the phone" to a verified result — the launch film.
Every time someone gets hired, applies for a mortgage, or runs a background check, somebody has to confirm they actually worked where they said they did. That means millions of phone calls a year to HR and payroll. Leaving voicemails. Sending emails. Sending faxes (yes, in 2026). Waiting days for a callback. Calling back. Getting transferred. Leaving another voicemail.
Background screeners and banks hire whole teams to do this. It's tedious, it's expensive, and turnover is brutal because the work is mind-numbing. We started Superunit because this entire layer of the economy still runs on manual calls and nobody's job is to fix it.
A product leader at a large background screener once told us employment verifications were "soul crushing." We got curious, then analyzed 200,000+ verifications to see where the work actually goes.
What 1.5 million calls, emails, and faxes reveal about employment verification.
We analyzed 200,000+ verifications run through Superunit for banks, mortgage lenders, and background screeners. Eleven findings in three parts: what applicants get wrong, why a database can't fix it, and what it takes to finish the job. They are also why we built Ava.
A submitted title rarely matches the employer's wording exactly, so equivalent titles are grouped together. Cashier to CFO and teller to bank manager are serious misrepresentations; adding senior or lead is usually seniority inflation. Inflation appears about five times as often as serious misrepresentation.
Inflations outnumber understatements 5 to 1.
Categories compare submitted and employer-verified titles. Equivalent wording and normalized role names count as confirmed; material changes in job function count as serious misrepresentation.
Most of it is memory, not deception: people round to years or blur two stints together. But for a lender calculating employment history or a screener checking a gap, a six month swing is the difference between a clean file and a follow-up.
Measured at month granularity across 34,581 completed verifications from the past six months where both submitted and employer-verified dates were on file. Start dates alone were off by 6+ months 19% of the time.
Most employers confirm the standard facts, but additional questions uncover clear negatives in about 4% of orders and milder flags in another 1%. That information is not stored in an instant employment record. It only surfaces when someone, or something, actually asks.
Of every 100 orders with additional questions, 5 surface derogatory information.
Instant databases resolved only about a third of verifications in our data. The other roughly 65% required calls, emails, or faxes to HR and payroll, plus the follow-up needed to finish. Automating only one outreach channel leaves half the problem on the table.
Instant databases resolve about a third of verifications, but within that third one company dominates. When a verification routes through a named third-party platform, 73% of the time it's one company: Equifax's The Work Number. It is a quiet chokepoint most people outside the industry have never heard of. Four brokers fulfill roughly 90% of third-party verifications.
The Work Number draws on roughly 4.2 million contributing employers and fulfilled about 149 million verification requests in 2024. On January 1, 2026, Equifax raised its per-verification price again, pushing the customer fee to around $105. The instant path keeps getting more expensive, while employers outside the database still have to be reached directly.
The Work Number scale figures per theworknumber.com (2024). January 1, 2026 price increase per ClearStar and JD Supra / Mitratech; customer fee figure per ClearStar and Pre-Employ.
Half of all verifications come back in under 16 hours, and 1 in 6 lands within the first hour. The slowest 10% take nearly four days, and that tail is what stalls a hire or a loan.
A completed employment verification takes a median of 5 touches, split about evenly between phone calls and emails. Half close in 5 touches or fewer, but 17% need 11 or more.
Based on 79,045 completed verifications. Fax activity appears in 4% of files.
Organic outbound calls only, excluding pre-scheduled callbacks. Each call localized to the employer's timezone by area code.
The best time to reach an employer is late morning, with completion rates peaking at 11am. They bottom out at 3pm, when a call is about 60% less likely to close the file.
Based on 56,000+ business-hours calls to US and Canadian employers.
A US verification comes back in about 17 hours, while a UK one takes closer to 57. The spread is country by country, with India fastest at about 15 hours and Germany and Ireland near the slow end.
All figures cover completed employment verifications between February 2025 and June 2026, exclude orders stalled on missing applicant data, and are aggregated and anonymized.
Speed is nearly uniform. From the fastest industry to the slowest, median completion time varies by only about six hours. Whether anyone answers is not. Schools and government agencies confirm about 3 in 4 verifications. Restaurants and trucking companies confirm closer to half. Every file in this dataset got the same outreach across phone and email. The difference is on the employer side: whether anyone picks up, and whether they will confirm. The industries hardest to reach by phone are also the ones least covered by instant databases.
Based on 34,400+ verifications with a definitive outcome at employers whose industry could be determined from name, roughly a quarter of decided verifications. A hand-validated sample of the remaining employers confirms the ranking. Industries with fewer than 500 decided verifications are not shown. Excludes orders stalled on missing applicant data, consistent with the rest of this report.
Cite this data: Superunit, State of Employment Verification 2026, superunit.com/launch
She does the contact research, calls HR, payroll, and admin departments, navigates phone trees, handles documents, sends emails and faxes, manages compliance, and publishes the results back to your system.
Calls, navigates IVR menus, talks to people, follows up until she gets an answer.
Sends, tracks, and works email and fax in parallel with the calls.
Verifies employment, income, DOT, references, tenancy, offer letters, and medical canvassing
Serves consumer reporting agencies, banks and mortgage lenders, and tenant screening firms
Publishes results back to your ERP with a clear, auditable record of how the answer was obtained
The result is a verification that comes back in under a day instead of several.
Ava replaces the call-center work of verifying employment, references, and education — so your team handles exceptions, not voicemails.
Automate VVOE and written verifications with every call recorded, transcribed, and audit-ready — so verification never stalls a close date.
Employment, income, and rental history verified in hours, not days — fast enough to keep applicants in competitive rental markets.
verifications processed
countries
banks & background screening customers
employment completion rate
average turnaround
pilot-to-deployment conversion
"If I have this technology, we will dominate the field."
A mortgage lender scaled loan volume 20x while keeping their verification team at just 2 people — avoiding 12 additional hires.
"You were a game-changer when we were in a really tight spot. We were growing quickly and losing customers because we couldn't meet their expectations."
If you run verifications and want them to move faster, let's talk.