- Get Started
Company
Before the offer, the board seat, or the wire, know what the record actually says about the person. The Appointment Report checks the résumé against primary documents, maps the corporate and litigation footprint, and reads what they have said in public — every finding dated, sourced, graded, and reviewed by an analyst before it reaches you.
An Appointment Report is not a search-results summary. It is a structured document — thirteen sections, every claim hyperlinked to the record behind it, every finding graded before it reaches a decision-maker. Click any section in the contents to read it.
Illustrative
Findings are stated neutrally. The report does not tell you whether to hire someone — that is your judgment, and it depends on things no public record contains. It tells you what is documented, how well it is documented, and what a diligent board would want answered before the vote.
The tenure gap is small, specific, and probably explainable. The résumé states CFO from 2016. A state annual report and two dated company announcements place the title change in 2018, with a controller role before it. That is a question, not an accusation — and Section 11 contains a passage from our own sourcing that may answer it.
The undisclosed entity is most likely paperwork. A single-member consulting LLC, registered in a state the candidate left in 2021, carrying no litigation, no liens, no tax warrants, and no enforcement action. The finding is the non-disclosure on a form you asked them to complete — not the entity.
The most expensive failure in automated background research is a different person with the same name. Before a single finding is written, every record is matched to the subject on corroborating attributes — address history, employer, age range, middle name, and co-appearing entities — or it is excluded and the exclusion is written down.
Every exclusion ships in the report with its reason. You should be able to see what we ruled out and why — not just what we kept.
More than a hundred distinct sources run against every subject and their documented orbit. The report names all of them and reports what each one returned, so you can tell a true null from a gap in somebody’s coverage.
A blank space in someone else’s report could mean nothing is there — or that nobody looked. This section is the difference, and it is why a clean candidate still produces a report worth what you paid for it.
| Claim | Stated | What the record shows | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Title & tenure, current employer | CFO, 2016–present | Controller 2016–2018; CFO from 2018, per the state annual report and two dated announcements | Discrepancy |
| Board seat, industry association | 2019–present | Listed as a director in IRS Form 990, Part VII, every year claimed | Verified |
| Prior role, named acquirer | VP Finance, 2012–2016 | Named in the transaction announcement and two trade-press items in that window | Verified |
| “Led the $340M refinancing” | — | Named as a participant in the announcement. The lead role is not attributed in any document we located | Unverified |
| Graduate degree | MBA, 2011 | Consistent across a decade of independent bios and the institution’s public alumni listing | Corroborated |
Claims are checked against the issuing body or a primary filing wherever one is public — not against a summary that repeats the résumé. A formal registrar confirmation requires the candidate’s written authorization, so a degree corroborated from public sources is graded Corroborated and never upgraded past it.
A discrepancy is reported as a discrepancy. It is not inflated into a finding of dishonesty, and it is not quietly dropped because the candidate is the front-runner. Those are different things, and the report keeps them different.
| Entity | Role | State | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current employer | Officer (CFO) | DE | Active — disclosed |
| Consulting LLC | Sole officer and registered agent | NC | Active — not on your questionnaire |
| Property holding LLC | Member | NC | Active — single residential property |
| Prior venture | Co-officer | VA | Administratively dissolved, 2019 |
Secured-lending filings are pulled for every entity and for the individual. Where a professional or regulatory license applies to the role, the public licensing database is checked and its status reported — including when the answer is that no license is required.
| Year | Role | Type | Disposition |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Named as officer; employer is defendant | Wrongful termination, former direct report | Dismissed with prejudice, 2021 |
| 2017 | Plaintiff | Contract dispute with a vendor | Settled; terms not public |
| 2014 | — | Federal dockets, all districts | No matching record |
Restrictive covenants — non-compete, non-solicit, garden leave — are read out of the public record where an agreement was filed as an exhibit, and flagged for your counsel where it was not. We report the exposure. We do not opine on enforceability, and any vendor who does is selling you a legal opinion they are not qualified to give.
Conference panels, earnings calls, podcast appearances, trade-press interviews, and the social archive are transcribed and speaker-labeled, so a quote is attributed to the person who actually said it and not to whoever was on the microphone next.
Deleted and edited posts are recovered from public web archives where a capture exists, with the capture linked so you can read the original yourself. What cannot be recovered is reported as unrecovered rather than speculated about, and no finding rests on a paraphrase of something nobody can produce.
Co-officers, co-directors, and co-investors are pulled from corporate registries, IRS 990 filings, and securities records to build the subject’s documented orbit. Then that orbit is run against the names you give us: your board, your cap table, your largest customers, your competitors, and anyone already under an agreement with you.
The subject and their documented orbit are screened against sanctions, federal exclusion and debarment lists, and enforcement archives. A clean screen is stated affirmatively, with the number of names screened and the lists they were screened against — because “we found nothing” and “we checked forty-one names against twelve lists and found nothing” are not the same sentence.
A name appearing in a document corpus is described as exactly that: a potential same-name reference requiring identity verification. Presence in a corpus is never treated as evidence of wrongdoing.
Context and mitigating factors. Title conventions at privately held companies are frequently informal before a recapitalization, and a candidate performing the CFO function under a controller title is an ordinary thing rather than a suspicious one. The report says so here, in the finding itself — not in a footnote nobody reads.
Before delivery, we re-read the sources the report itself cites and ask the opposite question: what in here supports the candidate? Unlike a speculative rebuttal, every item below is a verbatim passage from a source this report already uses.
…several hundred entities were administratively revoked that quarter after the state migrated its filing portal…
The state’s own notice explains the 2019 dissolution as a filing-portal artifact affecting hundreds of registrants. Our first draft framed it as a lapse by the subject. It was rewritten before delivery — not after the candidate corrected us in a room.
…titles were used loosely at the company before the 2018 recapitalization…
From a trade-press profile this report cites elsewhere. It is a real explanation for the tenure discrepancy in Section 10. Ask the question; do not assume the answer. The report marks the difference in the sentence itself.
…credited internally with holding the lender group together through the 2020 amendment…
From a source we pulled for the litigation section. It is the kind of thing a search firm’s reference calls rarely surface, because nobody thinks to ask the lenders.
Where a cited source has no full text captured for machine review, the report says “not machine-checked” rather than implying that it was.
| Section | What was searched | What came back | Why a human should look |
|---|---|---|---|
| Litigation | County courts in one jurisdiction from the address history | No remote docket access | Order a courthouse retrieval before the offer if that jurisdiction matters to you. We will arrange it; we will not pretend we already searched it. |
| Credentials | A second certificate listed on the professional profile | The issuing body publishes no verification path | Ask the candidate for the certificate. Absence of a public record is not evidence of fabrication. |
| Corporate | An officer record with a matching name in a state with no address history | Identity not established | Do not attribute. A false attribution here is a material error, and it is the error that ends vendor relationships. |
This is the section that keeps a report honest. Null results, identity-uncertain matches, and anything resting on a single unverifiable source route here — never into a graded finding, and never into the bottom line.
Government records and primary filings first, then named reporting, then aggregators and secondary summaries flagged for exactly what they are. A claim supported only by a source in the third tier is graded accordingly, and the grade appears next to the claim rather than in the bibliography.
Before delivery, every URL in the report is machine-checked. A dead link, a registry homepage standing in for a specific filing, or display text that does not match its destination is treated as a blocker — not as a nit to clean up in the next version.
The report ships as Word and PDF with a standalone bibliography, plus a one-page summary written to be handed to a board without translating it first, and the underlying document set so your counsel can read the filings rather than our description of them.
A reference call tells you what four people who like the candidate are willing to say out loud. It is a useful signal and a poor substitute for the record. This is the part nobody in the process actually owns.
Name, the role, the jurisdictions they have lived and worked in, and what you are about to decide — an offer, a board seat, an investment, a partnership. Send the conflict list too: your board, your cap table, your largest customers.
Before a single finding is written, records are matched to your subject on attributes beyond the name — or excluded, with the exclusion documented. Nothing that fails this gate reaches the report.
Entity registries, securities filings, dockets and court opinions, liens, property, nonprofit filings, sanctions and exclusion lists, news across hundreds of outlets, and the full public media archive including video and podcast appearances.
An analyst reviews every finding against the qualification gates, grades it for confidence and exposure, then adversarially re-reads our own sources for anything that helps the candidate — and prints what it finds.
The report, a one-page board summary, the bibliography, and the underlying documents. Refreshed on request through the decision window, so it is still current on the day the offer goes out.
Most screening products are graded on how much they surface. An Appointment Report is graded on how much survives — because a report with four things you can act on beats one with twenty you have to check yourself.
More than 100 data sources run across the subject and their documented orbit.
Every record is matched to your subject on at least two attributes beyond the name — address history, employer, age range, co-appearing entities — or it is excluded and the exclusion is written into the report.
A primary document, or two independent quality sources on the same fact. A single aggregator entry is a lead, not a finding, and it gets labeled as one.
A fact is not a finding unless it bears on the decision in front of you — the role, the fiduciary duty, the counterparties, or the announcement. Interesting is not the same as material, and padding a report with the former is how vendors hide the absence of the latter.
Absence of evidence is not evidence. “No record found” and “has never disclosed” route to Manual Review — never into a graded finding.
What is left carries a confidence badge, an exposure rating, a source-quality note, and a recommended use.
Nothing that fails a gate is deleted. It routes to Manual Review Required, labeled with the reason it did not qualify — so your team sees the whole picture and makes the call itself.
Speed is the easy part. These are the mechanisms that make a report safe to put in front of a board.
The most expensive failure in automated research is a different person with the same name. Records are matched on attributes beyond the name or excluded — and the exclusions ship in the report, so you can see what we ruled out.
A primary document, or two independent quality sources on the same fact. One aggregator entry is a lead, not a finding, and the report labels it that way instead of promoting it.
Citations hyperlink the claim itself, not a source name in parentheses at the end. Your general counsel can audit any line in the report without asking us for anything.
“We found no record” is a research outcome, not a finding. It routes to Manual Review with a note on what a human should check — instead of quietly becoming “has never disclosed.”
Before delivery we re-read our own sources hunting for what helps the candidate, and we print what we find — including the passages that force us to soften or pull a finding.
This is public-record and reputational diligence, not an FCRA background check — and it may not be used to make an employment, credit, or housing decision on its own. We put that in the report, not only in a footer, and we will tell you when you need a licensed screener too.
Everything an engagement hands your team, and how fast each piece moves.
Bottom line, identity resolution, coverage and scope, credential verification, corporate and litigation footprint, graded findings, counter-context, and manual-review notes — in Word and PDF, ready to be marked up.
Days, not weeks
The finding set compressed to a single page written for people who will read it once, in a meeting, ten minutes before a vote — with the grades intact so nothing reads more certain than it is.
Ships with the report
A standalone bibliography plus the primary documents themselves — registry filings, dockets, 990s, announcements — so your counsel reads the record rather than our description of it.
Retained and re-queryable
Searches take weeks and records change inside them. The report is refreshed against the current record instead of rewritten, and it carries a research cutoff so you always know how current it is.
Anytime, until you decide
Same sources, same gates — a different report depending on who the subject is and what you are about to commit to.
The standard engagement. Run on the final one or two candidates once the shortlist is real, so the questions you still need answered land in the last interview instead of in a press cycle after the announcement.
Key-person diligence for an investment, an acquisition, or a partnership. The financials get audited by professionals; the person usually gets a search engine and an afternoon. This is the other half of that work.
The same sources and the same gates run against someone already inside your organization — before an IPO, a public appointment, a controversy, or an activist campaign. You learn what a reporter will find while you still have time to have an answer.
These reports are about people, and a wrong one does real damage to someone who did nothing. So we report what is public, we date every finding, and we say plainly when we are not certain a record belongs to the subject rather than shipping a maybe as a fact.
We do not access private accounts, we do not present rumor or anonymous claims as findings, and we do not buy data that was not lawfully public to begin with. When something is old enough, minor enough, or explainable enough that it probably should not change your decision, the report says that too — a document you could not defend with the candidate in the room is not useful to you anyway.
An Appointment Report is reputational and public-record due diligence. It is not a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and it may not be used on its own to make an employment, credit, housing, or insurance decision — those require a licensed consumer reporting agency, with the notice and authorization steps that come with one. Many clients run both, and we will tell you when you need to.
“An executive announcement takes one press release to make and a full quarter to unmake.”
Send us one name to see the format, or a finalist slate to see the scale. We will walk you through a real report first — including the sections most screening products do not have — so you know exactly what you are buying.