What it is
Yardstik is a US background screening company from Minneapolis, founded in 2020, that sells screening as one part of a workforce trust product. It runs criminal searches, motor vehicle records, drug and DOT tests, healthcare screens, social media screens, and employment, education and license verification. It is an FCRA consumer reporting agency, PBSA accredited and SOC 2 certified. Around those checks it sells three things a classic screener treats as extras: its own identity verification (government ID analysis, a selfie with liveness check, device and behaviour risk signals), a Fraud Insights dashboard that aggregates fraud signals across the workforce, and continuous monitoring that enrolls every screened worker automatically.
The question it answers: should a remote or gig-heavy employer replace a one-time background check with screening plus ID verification plus monitoring after hire? The category leader it most resembles is Checkr, with a narrower customer base and a stronger fraud story.
Why it shows up in recruiting stacks now
On August 27, 2026 Yardstik raised a $30M Series B led by Harbert Growth Partners, bringing total funding to $65M. The company reports 149% year-over-year revenue growth and names TaskRabbit, Gopuff, Liveops, Sharetown and HUNGRY as customers. With the round it made Fraud Insights and continuous monitoring standard on every account at no added cost. The fraud numbers it publishes are vendor figures: about 1 in 30 applicants fails the government ID check, and it flags roughly 2,900 duplicate or flagged SSNs a year.
The second reason is the build. Yardstik sells white-label screening for platforms and embedded screening for gig marketplaces. Its REST API supports subaccounts per client, HMAC-signed webhooks, adverse action endpoints, monitoring endpoints, block lists for SSNs, phones, IPs and emails, and an embeddable iframe SDK (@yardstik/embeddable-sdk). Staffing software (Avionté, StaffingOS, Firstwork) and gig onboarding tools (GigSafe, Onboarded) resell it this way. It also has ATS integrations with Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Fountain, Bullhorn, iCIMS, Jobvite and Workable, and HRIS links to Workday and Paylocity. Since June 2025 it has been available inside Persona workflows.
The money from the round is earmarked for OIG exclusion monitoring, MVR monitoring and alerts when a worker’s license, insurance or certification expires. Treat those as roadmap until you see them in a demo.
Pricing reality
Yardstik publishes no rate card; the pricing page sends you to sales. Billing is per screen with no subscription, and it offers sequential screening: later stages run, and are billed, only if the candidate passes the earlier ones. Capterra lists a starting price of $8, which matches a single low-cost search, not a package. Partner pages for youth-sports platforms, as cited by FitGap, show a volume ladder: Standard Criminal at $25 per screen at 25 screens down to $16.50 at 500, and Premium Criminal at $35 down to $28.50. We could not open those pages directly, so treat the ladder as indicative.
Against Checkr ($29.99 Basic, $59.99 Essential with identity verification) the criminal package is cheaper at volume. The bigger difference is monitoring: Checkr charges about $1.70 per person per month for continuous criminal monitoring, which on a 2,000-worker fleet is roughly $40,800 a year. If Yardstik’s included monitoring covers what you need, that line goes away. Confirm in writing which monitoring products are included and which are billed, because the site lists more of them (daily criminal, sex offender registry, MVR re-checks, identity and license re-verification, re-screens) than the announcement says are free.
Best for
Trust and safety or workforce operations leads at US gig platforms, marketplaces and staffing firms that onboard hundreds to thousands of 1099 or hourly workers a year and need ID verification, screening and post-hire monitoring from one vendor, either embedded in their own app or triggered from Fountain, Bullhorn or Greenhouse.
It is the wrong pick for an employer hiring outside the US (it screens US applicants only), for a 10,000-employee enterprise that wants one global contract, and for a company running a few dozen checks a year that only needs a criminal search.
Versus the alternatives
Checkr is the default for US high-volume screening. Pick it when you need Assess to auto-adjudicate clean reports, deep county turnaround data and a published rate card, and when paying separately for monitoring is acceptable.
First Advantage is the largest screener by volume since buying Sterling. Pick it when you need one global contract inside Workday or SuccessFactors at enterprise scale.
Certn is the fast-growing option for multi-country mid-market hiring. Pick it when you hire across Canada, the UK and Australia as well as the US, which Yardstik does not cover.
Persona alone fits when the problem is identity fraud at sign-up and you do not need a consumer report. Pick Persona with Yardstik inside it when you want both under Persona’s workflow engine.
If none fit, run identity verification only on remote roles and keep your current screener; the fraud problem is often concentrated in a few role types.
Watch-outs
- “Monitoring included” has edges. The Series B announcement says monitoring is standard, but the product page lists seven monitoring and re-check products. Guard: get an order form that names each included product and the price of each excluded one before you migrate a fleet.
- Roadmap items are being sold alongside shipped ones. OIG exclusion monitoring and license or insurance expiry alerts were announced as use of funds. Guard: for healthcare or licensed-trade fleets, make those features a contract condition with a date, or keep your current exclusion-list vendor.
- Thin review base. Ratings are high (4.8 on G2 from 37 reviews, 4.9 on Capterra from 18) but the samples are small, and one complaint is poor visibility into why a check is delayed. Guard: pilot on 50-100 real workers, log time to completed report by check type, and require status webhooks into your ATS rather than relying on the dashboard.
- Continuous monitoring creates FCRA duty after hire. Every new record on an active worker needs the same individualized assessment and pre-adverse notice as a pre-hire report. Yardstik automates the notices with a configurable 7-day minimum wait, but the decision stays with you. Guard: write an adjudication matrix for post-hire alerts before turning monitoring on, and assign an owner for the alert queue. See AI interview fraud for how ID checks fit in front of screening, and watch candidate experience drop-off at the selfie step.