The State of Background Checking in Australia

Executive summary

Hiring in Australia is slower, more contested and more consequential than it has been in years. Fewer people are changing jobs, applications per role are at record highs, and the penalty regime around getting a hire wrong, whether on work rights, child safety or privacy, has been rebuilt within the last twenty-four months. Six findings shape this report:

• 01Job mobility has fallen to 7.7% and applications per job ad hit record highs in June 2026. Each vacancy now attracts more candidates, and more incentive to stand out by any means.
• 02More than three quarters of businesses screening candidates found at least one discrepancy in the last year, and roughly one in six report identity fraud inside their hiring process.
• 03The employer-sanctions regime was rebuilt in 2024: civil penalties for employing someone without work rights now reach $87,360 per contravention, with criminal exposure up to $131,040 and two years imprisonment, plus a public register of prohibited employers.
• 04Working with Children Check reform reached national agreement in November 2025: negative decisions in one state will now be recognised in the others.
• 05Candidate data has become a liability class. A statutory privacy tort commenced in June 2025, serious-breach penalties reach $50 million, and 2025 set an all-time record for notifiable data breaches.
• 06Screening practice is consolidating: structured digital references, fraud signals on referee authenticity, in-house medical coordination and continuous post-hire monitoring are replacing the five-vendor screening stack.

1. The hiring market this year

The defining feature of the 2026 hiring market is caution. In the year to February 2025, only 7.7% of employed Australians changed employer, about 1.1 million people, continuing a multi-year decline from the post-pandemic churn peak.^[1] Unemployment has held near historic lows at 4.4% as of June 2026.^[2] People are staying put, which means the candidates who do move carry higher stakes for everyone involved.

At the same time, competition for each advertised role is intensifying. SEEK reported job ads down 5.8% year on year in June 2026 while applications per ad reached a record high, rising for four consecutive months.^[3] Skills shortages are easing but far from gone: Jobs and Skills Australia assessed 29% of occupations in national shortage in 2025, down from 33% the year before, with 139 occupations in shortage for five or more consecutive years, concentrated in construction, engineering, health and early childhood education.^[4]

The practical consequence for employers: more applicants per role, more pressure on candidates to differentiate themselves, and in shortage occupations, more temptation to wave candidates through quickly. Both conditions reward careful screening, and both punish slow screening. A candidate who clears checks in days accepts your offer; one who waits weeks often has somewhere else to go.

2. The honesty gap

The most reliable current data on candidate honesty comes from screening volume itself. In HireRight's 2025 global benchmark survey, more than three quarters of businesses reported finding at least one candidate discrepancy during screening in the prior twelve months. The most common were employment history discrepancies (64% of businesses) and education discrepancies (47%).^[5] Roughly one in six businesses reported encountering identity fraud in their hiring process.^[6]

Australian self-report data points the same way. In a 2025 commissioned survey of just over 1,000 Australians, a third admitted to lying during a job search, most commonly about their reasons for leaving a previous role and their employment dates.^[7] On the reference side, the most detailed Australian study remains a 2017 survey of 1,000 jobseekers in which 71% admitted exploiting flaws in the reference-checking process: avoiding referees likely to be critical, selecting favourable rather than relevant referees, or coaching referees on what to say.^[8] That research is now nine years old, and it was commissioned by a screening vendor, but nothing in the newer discrepancy data suggests the underlying behaviour has improved.

Fraud runs in both directions. The National Anti-Scam Centre's job-scam fusion cell recorded more than 3,000 reports of employment scams in 2024 with $13.7 million in reported losses, targeting jobseekers with fake roles and fake recruiters.^[9] A market where candidates are routinely scammed by fake employers is also a market where employers should expect professionalised fakery aimed back at them: fabricated referees, coached references, and borrowed identities.

A note on the numbers you will not find here. The claim that "78% of resumes contain lies" and the "US Department of Labor" figure putting a bad hire at 30% of first-year salary circulate widely in HR content. Our research could not trace either to a verifiable primary source, so this report does not use them.

3. A heavier compliance stack

The legal consequences of a careless hire have grown materially in the last two years, across three separate regimes.

Work rights

The Migration Amendment (Strengthening Employer Compliance) Act 2024, in force since 1 July 2024, rebuilt the employer-sanctions regime.^[10] Allowing or referring a person to work in breach of their visa conditions now carries civil penalties of up to 240 penalty units per contravention, which is $87,360 at the penalty-unit value that took effect on 1 July 2026.^[11] Aggravated conduct is a criminal offence carrying up to two years imprisonment and fines up to $131,040. The Act also created prohibition declarations, banning repeat offenders from employing further migrant workers, published on a public register. Checking work rights is no longer an administrative nicety; it is exposure management.

Child-related work

Working with Children Checks have operated as eight separate state and territory schemes with limited information sharing. That changed in November 2025, when every jurisdiction endorsed a national reform agreement under which negative notices, suspensions and interim bars issued in one state are recognised in the others.^[12] For employers in care, education and community sectors, the era of a barred worker crossing a border to a clean slate is closing, and verification expectations on employers are rising with it.

Criminal history and fitness for duty

The National Police Checking Service processes over five million nationally coordinated criminal history checks a year through ACIC-accredited bodies.^[13] In safety-critical industries, medical fitness is regulated as firmly as criminal history: rail safety workers are assessed under the National Standard for Health Assessment of Rail Safety Workers, revised with effect from November 2024;^[14] Queensland coal mine workers require scheme medicals on entry and at least every five years;^[15] and seafarers on regulated Australian vessels must hold an AMSA certificate of medical fitness under Marine Order 76.^[16] For employers in these industries, screening is not one check but a standing obligation.

4. Candidate data as a liability

Screening generates exactly the kind of personal information that privacy law now treats most seriously: identity documents, work rights, health information, criminal history. Three developments make how you handle it a board-level question.

First, penalties. Since December 2022, serious or repeated privacy interference by a company can attract civil penalties of up to $50 million, three times the benefit obtained, or 30% of adjusted turnover, whichever is greater.^[17] Second, individual rights. A statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy commenced on 10 June 2025, giving individuals, including candidates, a direct cause of action through the courts.^[18] Third, breach reality. The OAIC received 1,205 notifiable data breach reports in 2025, the highest since the scheme began, with malicious or criminal activity behind 716 of them and health service providers the most affected sector.^[19]

The implication for screening is simple to state and hard to retrofit: candidate data should live in as few systems as possible, with consent captured per check, access controlled per role, and an audit trail on every disclosure. Every extra vendor holding copies of passports and medical results is another entry in next year's breach statistics.

5. How screening practice is changing

Against that backdrop, four shifts are visible in how Australian employers and recruiters actually run screening. These are practice observations rather than survey statistics, drawn from what the market is building and buying.

From phone tag to structured digital references. The phone reference survives on familiarity, but it produces inconsistent notes, invites coached answers and takes days of back and forth. Structured digital questionnaires produce comparable answers across candidates, give referees time to answer properly, and create a written record that can be audited later. The better implementations now ask adaptive follow-up questions when a referee gives a short or guarded answer, recovering the probing quality of a good phone interviewer without the phone tag.

Fraud checks on the reference itself. Given how easily references are gamed, screening is extending beyond the candidate to the referee: verifying referee identity, confirming the employer is a genuine registered business, checking that the referee's email domain matches their claimed employer, and watching for signals such as a referee responding from the same device as the candidate.

Consolidation of the screening stack. The typical mid-sized employer has historically run references, police checks, work rights, medicals and licence verification through separate providers, each with its own portal, invoice and data store. The privacy exposure described above, plus plain administrative fatigue, is pushing screening into consolidated platforms where one candidate file holds every check and one audit trail covers the lot.

From point-in-time checks to standing compliance. Visas expire, licences lapse and sanctions lists change after the start date. Employers in regulated industries are moving to scheduled re-screening, monthly work-rights confirmation, quarterly sanctions and adverse-media sweeps, and expiry tracking on licences and tickets, treating compliance as continuous rather than a hiring-day event.

6. What good looks like in 2026

A practical standard for screening programs, drawn from the material above:

1. 01Match checks to the role, not a blanket pack: work rights for everyone; WWCC for child-related work; medicals where fitness for duty is regulated; licences verified from source documents.
2. 02Run checks in parallel, not in sequence. The offer should never be waiting on the slowest check to start.
3. 03Use structured reference questionnaires with consistent questions per role, and keep the written record.
4. 04Verify the referee, not just the reference: identity, employer registration, email domain, and device signals.
5. 05Capture specific consent per check, and be able to show it later.
6. 06Hold candidate data in as few systems as possible, with role-based access and a full audit trail.
7. 07Give candidates one place to complete everything, with visible progress. Screening is their first experience of you as an employer.
8. 08Track expiry dates on everything that lapses: visas, licences, tickets, medicals.
9. 09Re-screen on a schedule appropriate to the role, rather than assuming hiring-day facts stay true.
10. 10Write down who reviews adverse findings and how. A flag is a prompt for human judgement, not a verdict.

Method and sources

This report was compiled in July 2026 from public primary sources and clearly attributed industry research. Where a widely circulated statistic could not be traced to a verifiable origin, it was excluded. Vendor-funded research is identified as such, and data vintage is stated where it matters.

1. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Job mobility, year to February 2025. abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/job-mobility-continues-decline-2025
2. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force, June 2026. abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/unemployment-rate-remains-44-june
3. SEEK Employment Report, June 2026, as reported by Staffing Industry Analysts. staffingindustry.com/news/global-daily-news/australias-job-ads-in-june-record-steepest-decline-since-early-2025
4. Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025 Occupation Shortage List. jobsandskills.gov.au/news/shortages-ease-gaps-persist-2025-occupation-shortage-list
5. HireRight, 2025 Global Benchmark Report. hireright.com/company/newsroom/hireright-releases-2025-global-benchmark-report
6. HireRight, 2025 Global Benchmark Report, identity fraud findings, as above.
7. Tapt, Resume Fraud Report Australia, 2025 (survey of 1,003 Australians via Pureprofile). tapt.io
8. Xref, Recruitment Risk Index, 2017 (survey of 1,000 Australian jobseekers; vendor-commissioned; dated, included for absence of newer Australian reference-fraud data). xref.com/blog/a-full-perspective-reference-checks-recruitment-risks-in-australia
9. National Anti-Scam Centre / ACCC, Job Scam Fusion Cell Final Report, May 2025 (2024 data). nasc.gov.au/news/job-scam-fusion-cell-disrupts-fake-job-networks-targeting-australians
10. Migration Amendment (Strengthening Employer Compliance) Act 2024 (Cth). legislation.gov.au/C2024A00001/latest/text; Department of Home Affairs employer guidance. immi.homeaffairs.gov.au
11. Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) s4AA; Commonwealth penalty unit $364 from 1 July 2026. legislation.gov.au
12. Standing Council of Attorneys-General, national WWCC reform agreement, November 2025; NSW Office of the Children's Guardian. ministers.ag.gov.au; ocg.nsw.gov.au
13. Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, National Police Checking Service. acic.gov.au/national-police-checking-service
14. National Transport Commission, National Standard for Health Assessment of Rail Safety Workers, in effect 11 November 2024. ntc.gov.au
15. Resources Safety and Health Queensland, Coal Mine Workers' Health Scheme. business.qld.gov.au
16. Australian Maritime Safety Authority, Marine Order 76 (Health, medical fitness). amsa.gov.au
17. Privacy Legislation Amendment (Enforcement and Other Measures) Act 2022 (Cth); OAIC regulatory guidance. oaic.gov.au
18. OAIC, statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy, commenced 10 June 2025. oaic.gov.au/privacy/your-privacy-rights/more-privacy-rights/statutory-tort-for-serious-invasions-of-privacy
19. OAIC, Notifiable Data Breaches, 2025 calendar-year statistics. oaic.gov.au