2017 Game Changer: Brian Monahan

Brian Monahan is no stranger to entrepreneurship.

At 19, he and his brother started his first company, Inflection Inc., the parent firm of PeopleSmart. They later expanded into historical court records for genealogy (archives.com) which they sold to Ancestry.com in 2012 for $100 million. Then Inflection focused its attention on employment background checks. 

Monahan, 29, sensed another business opportunity — but he didn’t want to create just another background check company. In 2013, Monahan launched GoodHire, a background check firm that empowers candidates to see their own information so they can verify and provide additional context to the information employers see. To Monahan, allowing candidates access to this information through its True Me platform allows them to provide additional context to items that may otherwise deter their candidacy.

Humanizing background checks in this manner isn’t just beneficial to the candidate, however. By including candidates in the screening process, Monahan believes employers benefit by maintaining larger candidate pools from which to recruit talent. GoodHire has built a devoted following of 35,000 companies, with True Me earning a nearly 96 percent satisfaction rating among users.

[To read about our other 2017 Game Changers, click here.]