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Candidate identity checks used to be treated as an extra step reserved for high security roles, government contracts, financial services, healthcare, while most employers relied on a resume, an interview, and a standard background check. That assumption is breaking down quickly, for reasons that have nothing to do with any single company’s risk appetite.
Regulatory expansion, staffing supply chain requirements, and the sheer scale of remote hiring fraud have combined to make candidate identity checks a baseline expectation rather than an optional extra, for reasons worth walking through concretely.
Employment eligibility and identity verification mandates have expanded significantly. Over 25 states now require some form of E-Verify for public employers, contractors, or private companies, and several additional states are actively considering extending that requirement to private employers generally. A 2025 federal rule change also allows USCIS to investigate and prosecute employment verification failures directly, without routing through a separate enforcement agency first, which meaningfully raises the practical consequence of getting identity verification wrong.
Separately, 2026 Federal Acquisition Regulation updates now require identity and eligibility verification for nearly all new hires and rehires on federal contracts, extending down through third party vendors and staffing agencies supplying labor to those contracts.
For staffing and recruiting firms specifically, the requirement increasingly does not stop at your own hires. Federal contract requirements now extend verification obligations through the entire labor supply chain, meaning a staffing agency’s clients may require proof of identity verification for every worker placed, not just direct employees.
A multi location or multi division organization that verifies inconsistently, one division compliant, another not, is exactly the pattern that has caused real audit failures, not through bad intent but through inconsistent process across the organization.
Beyond regulation, the practical case has gotten stronger simply because remote hiring removed the in person moment that used to make an identity mismatch obvious. A document handed across a table, a face seen without a screen in between, both disappeared once interviews and onboarding moved online, and fraud rings have moved into that gap deliberately. Glider’s own ID Verify research covers what that fraud actually looks like in practice, from proxy interviewing to nation state impersonation schemes.
None of this means every organization needs the most invasive verification stack available. It does mean identity verification is worth building into the process deliberately, consistently across every division and every hiring channel, rather than added inconsistently or only after a bad hire makes the gap obvious.
For a concrete walkthrough of what that process actually involves step by step, see our Identity Verification in Hiring guide, and for the technology behind the identity confirmation step specifically, see our piece on biometric verification.
Candidate identity checks moved from optional to expected because the conditions that used to make them unnecessary, in person hiring, light regulation, low fraud volume, have all changed at the same time.
Treating identity verification as core infrastructure now is considerably cheaper than treating it as a response to an audit failure or a fraud incident later.
Requirements vary by jurisdiction and industry, but over 25 U.S. states now require some form of E-Verify for public employers, contractors, or private companies, and federal contract rules increasingly extend verification requirements through staffing supply chains.
Three forces are driving this: expanding state and federal regulation, staffing supply chain requirements that extend to third party vendors, and the practical rise in remote hiring fraud that in person hiring used to prevent naturally.
E-Verify is a federal system that confirms a new hire’s employment eligibility against government records. It is one specific, legally mandated form of identity and eligibility check, and its use has expanded significantly at the state and federal contractor level in recent years.
Increasingly yes. Federal contract requirements now extend identity verification obligations through the entire labor supply chain, meaning staffing agencies may need to verify identity for every worker they place on covered contracts, not only their own direct hires.
Consequences range from a higher risk of hiring fraud and its associated costs to, for regulated employers and federal contractors, real audit failures and direct investigation, since a 2025 federal rule change allows direct enforcement action rather than routing through a separate referral process.
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