The "global office" is no longer a futuristic concept. It’s the standard reality for businesses. We’ve entered the era of the borderless talent market, where the geographical location of a candidate is increasingly secondary to their skill set.
For Consumer Reporting Agencies (CRAs), this shift represents the single biggest growth opportunity in a decade. But it also presents a significant operational trap: global scale without operational predictability. As more clients expand their hiring footprint, the challenge has shifted. It’s no longer just about finding the data in a foreign jurisdiction; it’s about managing the unpredictable friction of the global screening workflow.
The Acceleration of the Borderless Market
The shift toward international hiring is no longer just a trend. According to Remote’s 2025 Global Workforce Report, international hiring is becoming the "default" strategy for growth, with over 50% of respondents expecting to increase their international headcount this year.
Furthermore, a recent article from Northman & Sterling notes that more than 60% of multinational companies have now adopted cross-border hiring models. For CRAs, this means the volume of international requests isn't just growing, it's becoming a core component of the business.
From Access to Consistency
For a long time, the primary hurdle in our industry was simply "finding the data." We focused on building networks and identifying sources in remote provinces. While sourcing remains nuanced, accessing global data has now become the baseline expectation, while the higher-order challenge is maintaining operational consistency.
When a client moves from hiring in one country to twenty, the friction scales exponentially. Without a predictable workflow, operations become a constant exercise in exception management.
These are the practical challenges that add unexpected complexity:
Supporting a client across 20 countries means more than managing 20 data sources. It means 20 different consent legalities, requirement expectations, turnaround expectations, and more.
To thrive in this environment, companies are shifting their focus from data collection to workflow architecture — designing global screening processes that reduce exceptions, clarify requirements, and create consistent expectations across borders. Compliance is critical, but so is predictability. Clients don’t just want results; they want to know what to expect so they can plan onboarding timelines with confidence.
The Global Competitive Edge in 2026
The employment screening services market is growing at a compound annual rate of nearly 10%, projected to reach over $7.5 billion by 2030 (The Business Research Company). As workforce mobility and cross‑border hiring expand, international screening is a key driver of that growth, and the CRAs that capture it won't be the ones with the longest list of countries on their website. They will be the ones who solve the workflow problem — delivering clarity, consistency, and predictability at a global scale.
Your Global Screening Partner
At InformData, we empower our customers to move beyond simply accessing global data to operating global screening with confidence. We connect businesses to verifiable people data—covering identity, credentials, and behaviors—and enable predictable, compliant workflows across jurisdictions that reduce the friction of international hiring.
With deep global expertise and a focus on operational reliability, we help CRAs set accurate expectations, support onboarding timelines with greater consistency, and scale international screening without sacrificing transparency, compliance, or trust.
To learn more about our comprehensive suite of international data solutions, contact our team of experts.