Most background checks are built to verify facts. Did the degree exist? Were the dates right? Is there a criminal record?
Those checks are essential. They are also blind to the thing that damages workplaces most often: how someone treats the people around them.
The FCA’s new rules solve part of this for UK financial services by requiring NFM findings to travel in regulatory references. Every other employer has to build the capability into its own process.
The challenge is doing it without turning hiring into a rumour mill. Conduct history is sensitive, often contested and hedged by privacy, defamation and employment law. What follows rests on four principles: relevance, substantiation, fairness and consistency.
Decide Where the Conduct Lens Belongs
Not every role needs the same depth. Start by identifying where conduct history genuinely matters to the risk.
That usually means anyone with authority over other people, from team leads to executives. It means roles with access to vulnerable people, in healthcare, education, care and customer-facing services. And it means senior or client-facing roles where one person’s behaviour shapes a culture or a reputation.
Write those tiers into policy. A documented, role-based rationale is what makes a conduct inquiry defensible, and what stops it drifting into every hire by default.
Ask the Candidate First, and Ask Precisely
The most underused source of conduct information is the candidate.
At the offer stage, for roles in the conduct tier, ask a specific written question: have you ever been the subject of an upheld finding of misconduct at work, or left a role while a disciplinary process about your conduct was still open? Explain why you’re asking and how the answer will be used.
Two things follow.
Candidates with a finding in their past get to give context before anyone else does, which is fairer.
And the question creates a clean integrity test. If a later check shows the answer was false, the issue is no longer the underlying allegation, which may be contested. It is the dishonesty, which is not.
The Odey case is a reminder that regulators treat obstructing accountability as an integrity failure in itself. The Tribunal upheld findings that he twice dismissed his executive committee to halt a disciplinary process about his behaviour. A candidate who hides a finding is making a smaller version of the same choice.
Ask Former Employers Better Questions
The traditional reference asks whether the person was employed, for how long, in what role, and perhaps whether the employer would rehire. None of that reaches conduct.
With the candidate’s consent, ask directly. Was the individual the subject of any upheld finding of misconduct, disciplinary action or conduct-related warning? Did they leave while any investigation into their conduct was unresolved?
In UK financial services, the SYSC 22 template already requires mandatory disclosure of conduct breaches and disciplinary action for senior and certified roles. Elsewhere, you are asking a voluntary question, and many employers will decline to answer.
Record declines, but read them carefully. A refusal to comment is usually a policy, not a signal. It only becomes meaningful alongside other information, such as an issue the candidate described differently. Never treat a single declined reference as an adverse finding.
And confirm the person answering is who they claim to be. A conduct question answered by an impostor is worse than no answer at all.
Use the Public Record, With Judgement
Some conduct history is public, and most employers never look.
In the UK, employment tribunal decisions have been published online since 2017, and the FCA’s register shows individuals subject to prohibition orders. Professional regulators such as the GMC and NMC publish fitness to practise outcomes. In India, court records can surface civil and criminal matters, including disputes that began as workplace complaints. Adverse media, across the languages and geographies of a career, fills in the rest.
Every one of these sources needs a skilled human reader.
A tribunal claim against an employer may name a manager without any finding against them personally. A news story may describe an allegation that was later withdrawn.
The value of the public record lies in the distinction between allegation, settlement, finding and conviction, and in having someone qualified to tell them apart.
Separate Findings From Allegations
This is the discipline that keeps a conduct inquiry fair.
The FCA’s own survey is a useful reality check: 62% of reported discrimination incidents and 47% of bullying and harassment incidents were not upheld. Many complaints are genuine but unprovable. Some are neither. An inquiry that treats every allegation as a finding will punish the wrong people and protect nobody.
So set the rule in advance. Substantiated findings carry weight in proportion to their seriousness, their relevance to the role and their age. Unproven allegations generally do not, with one narrow exception: serious, credible concerns, directly relevant to the role, where the person left before the process ended.
For that exception, borrow the FCA’s framework, published in April 2026 for exactly this situation. Weigh the seriousness of the suspected misconduct, the grounds for the belief, the duty to act fairly and wider legal considerations such as privacy and employment law.
It works just as well for a hiring decision as it does for a reference.
Give the Candidate a Voice Before You Decide
Where something material surfaces, talk to the candidate before the decision hardens.
Context changes meaning. A finding from eight years ago, followed by a clean record and genuine reflection, is different from a recent finding the candidate minimises. A disputed allegation the candidate raised openly is different from one they concealed.
In the US, where the check comes through a consumer reporting agency, the FCRA already requires a pre-adverse action notice and a copy of the report before a final decision. It is good practice everywhere.
Document the conversation and the reasoning. A decision you can explain is a decision you can defend.
Write the References You’d Want to Receive
The other half of this playbook is your own exits, because the reference your firm writes is part of someone else’s screening.
Wherever feasible, finish investigations before people leave. The FCA’s guidance says so explicitly for regulated firms, and the logic applies everywhere: a process abandoned at resignation produces nothing anyone can rely on.
Don’t sign settlements that gag references. For regulated firms, the reference obligation already overrides agreements the rules prohibit, and the Employment Rights Act will void clauses that stop workers speaking out about harassment or discrimination. Outside the UK, take local legal advice before agreeing to silence.
Keep conduct records for at least six years, the horizon the regulatory reference regime uses. Separate the factual reference, which confirms employment, from conduct disclosure, which should be reviewed by legal or senior HR against a clear written policy.
In India, work within the POSH Act’s confidentiality provisions, which may mean disclosing only what the law permits, or only with the individual’s consent.
Respect the Private-Life Boundary
Conduct screening can overreach, and the FCA has drawn a line that is useful for everyone.
Its guidance says firms are not required to monitor employees’ private lives or social media, or to investigate private-life allegations that are trivial, implausible or irrelevant.
Hiring should show the same restraint. The question is conduct connected to work, or private conduct that shows a genuine, material risk to the role. It is not a trawl through someone’s life for anything unflattering.
Make It Consistent and Auditable
Run the conduct lens the same way for everyone in the same tier: the same questions, the same sources, the same thresholds and the same documented reasoning.
Consistency protects candidates, because it stops the process being applied only to people a hiring manager already doubts. It protects the organisation too, because a conduct decision made inconsistently is an open invitation to a discrimination claim.
Audit a sample every year. Look at who was flagged, what was found, how decisions were made and whether any group is being treated differently.
A Clean Exit Should Mean Something
For years, a clean exit meant very little. A resignation, a settlement and a neutral reference looked identical whether someone left to chase a better salary or to escape an investigation.
The FCA has changed that meaning for UK financial services. Employers everywhere else can change it for themselves: by asking the conduct question precisely, reading the answers fairly and answering honestly when the question arrives at their door.
The people who benefit most never appear in any of these processes. They are the colleagues who get to work alongside someone whose past was genuinely checked.
