Max: Hello. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome Bob Mather, who is a private investigator, as well as the founder and CEO of one of the leading. Background checking company, Pre-Employ, Bob, welcome to the show. 

Bob: Hey Max, how's it going?

Max: Going strong going strong. We in the introduction introduced you as a private investigator. Is this how you stumbled into the world of technology? With long rain coats and you know, stalking people in their private lives. 

Bob: Wow. You have really just painted quite a picture.

No, but close. Even though at one time, I didn't have a rank though. I did have one of those coats. It was probably 20 years ago. I started out my career specializing in embezzlement for retailers. So I would be the guy in the company that they would hire when they were missing $10,000, $20,000, whatever.

And then  I would bring in a forensic team or a surveillance team and would try to put the pieces of the puzzle together and find out who was embezzling. And then I would also help. Yeah. I would help with the prosecutions. If there were criminal charges, advise them my opinion on what they should do and how they should do it.

And then also work with civil restitution recovery. 

Max: Wow. That's great. This is the great foundation, right? Because you have seen the crimes committed and with your own eyes, so you can really empathize with your customers. 

Bob: Yeah, well, yeah, I've done thousands of interrogations for the specific embezzlement type cases. I also work with employers when it comes to workplace investigations and always have whether it be discrimination of sexual harassment other types of things, my team and I will come in and put the pieces together and show what really has happened with all of the emotion out of it.

But when I first started doing this was in the early nineties and background checks really weren't a thing then, and back in the nineties and you know, there wasn't even an internet. Really, the internet had just started. We had Netscape. Right. We had this world of background checks that was done, when we did do a background check, it was very expensive and it was done by paper.

And you might call the local sheriff or even try to get you could walk into a courthouse. You couldn't, there was no technology then. And hiring. If you wanted to hire someone you needed a background check on them. It could take a month. it just was the way it was, had been done forever, but with technology and I was an early adopter in technology, you know we started doing background checks.

What happened was I was doing embezzlement investigations. And in one region of the United States, I caught, I investigated, prosecuted, and put a person in jail that was stealing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. About a year or so later, another company called me and said, hey, We're losing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.

And I said, well, okay, I can schedule to be down there. I'll start the investigation, but can you send me your employee list? Let's see who's working there now. I'd like to see. And there was on the employee list they sent, there was the same guy.

And I said, well, you know, If they only would have known, you know 400 miles away, he just got out of jail.

Max: you know, all the great embezzlement guys that should be working for you.

Bob: Yeah, no, no. When you work that type of work, the only embezzlement guys and girls, I know are the unlucky ones or the ones that are not that smart. The good ones I've never met. 

Max: I was just thinking, yeah maybe there's a limit, right? If you embezzle $500, you never get caught.

If you're inbezzlel, half a million, obviously you're the venture you'll get caught pretty soon. Maybe there's a sweet spot there. I don't know. 

Bob: I think it's like playing blackjack or gambling. If you quit, you might get away with it. But the longer you play, the odds are against you. 

Max: Okay, great.

Well I suppose yeah, millions of dollars are being saved now by the retail sector because of providers such as yourself.  Have you been able to quantify that you know, for the industry or how do you put a number on it for your customers at the beginning of those discussions?

I suppose now it's not so much.  I suspect someone is taking money from you, it's more, standardized, right? 

Bob: It's more standardized now. It's for safety, is really the big concern right now. Safety of customers, safety of other employees. And as the industry progressed in the early 2000s, I mean, basically it was this.

If the company. Whether it was a hospital or a retailer down the street did background checks and you didn't, you only were really sure of one thing. The people that were afraid to get their background checked were not applying at the guy who does the background checks. They were coming to you.

And we actually would see that. So when we would get a new client. We would do background checks on all the employees and to do that, they would have to sign a form. Well, we would get people that would just leave. Like they wouldn't come to work. It was over. And then once we looked into it further, we could see that they had, you know, quite a background and then they would go to the next company that didn't do background checks.

And, and today it's 90%, 96% of employers in most industries do background checks. 

Max: I was thinking about that. 

So for those 4%, that's that don't do, you know, maybe they have a wonderful opportunity, right? Because then they really have to pick up the litter. They can choose between anybody who has a criminal record, they can choose between them and they can take the best ones, the ones that truly want to reform their lives and, you know, start fresh, the ones that quit like a blackjack.

Bob: Yeah. Or the ones that had a type of crime that really doesn't have anything to do with the position. So in the world of finance, for example obviously embezzlement would be a very big concern. It would be a killer of any opportunity, but not necessarily let's say a bar fight or where you got drunk driving.

Right. So You know, the industry has changed and it's still changing,  Now there's not only a demand.  When we first started out  in the 2000s and 2010s, there wasn't the emphasis on speed as there is now, or talent acquisition leaders now are driven by the need to hire and to hire at scale.

You know, we've got a starting class. We need to have X number of people. Hundreds of people are coming in and I need these done now. And for a lot of organizations that can be scary because the person who's ordering and overseeing the selection of what company to use is in such a hurry. And it gets bonuses and it gets financial payments for getting people through the system.

They don't necessarily care about the quality like it used to be. It's a strange relationship. 

Max: It's commoditized and it's looked as as a necessary, a mandatory step, as op...