Remote work has evolved from a necessity during the pandemic to a significant and lasting shift in how many companies operate today. As businesses scale and continue to embrace distributed teams, the importance of creating a safe, compliant, and trustworthy work environment grows. From leveraging blockchain for digital credentials to creating a global screening platform across 180+ countries Daniel Callaghan, CEO of Veremark is setting new standards in background verification and workplace trust.
Background screening should not be complicated. It is, however, a regulatory or mandatory necessity for organizations. If you care about the culture of your workplace, and if you care about the environment that you want people to work in and their sense of safety, then it is also a best practice thing to do from a hiring perspective.
Here is the transcript of our conversation:
Yuying Deng:
Alright, welcome to Scaling Today, the podcast where we explore how companies skill and also the future of work. I’m your host, Yuying Deng, and today we have a very interesting episode lined up for you. Our guest today is Daniel Callaghan. He’s the CEO of Veremark, which is a leading company in background verification and also pre-hire checks as well.
Daniel has had 15 years of experience in the HR tech industry, and other than Veremark, he has also been involved in running the Workplace Accelerator, which is a program for HR tech startups. So Daniel was very, very steeped indeed in the whole HR tech sector. Veremark is actually one of Esevel’s first customers, so I thank Daniel very much for the confidence that he has had in us. I’ve known Daniel for two years by now, and I’m really excited to dive into his unique approach and expertise towards remote work. So, welcome to the show, Daniel. Would you like to say a few words to our audience?
Daniel Callaghan:
Sure. Well, thank you, Yuying, for the introduction, and hello listeners. Delighted to be here. As mentioned, I’m one of the founders of a business called Veremark. We see ourselves as the world’s fastest-growing workplace trust platform. That is to say, ultimately, our mission is to help companies create safer and more trusted workplaces. The core product around that at the moment is pre-employment screening and background checks. We’ve also just launched a whistleblowing service. And as you know, as mentioned, we’re an early customer of Esevel, so equally, thank you for helping us reach the heights that we have through great service from them as well. But yeah, excited to be here and share any insights I can with your listeners.
Yuying Deng:
Yeah, whistleblowing service, that actually sounds very interesting. So, I want to go into that a bit more later. To kick things off, Daniel, I know that you have had quite a lot of experience prior to Veremark, right? Could you tell us a bit about your background and how you got started with the idea of Veremark?
Daniel Callaghan:
Sure. So, my background is more in the world of HR tech and the future of work. I actually started my career in advertising. I did a couple of years devising media strategies and such for Procter & Gamble. Then, I decided I wanted to go to business school around 2007, graduating in 2009, which, unfortunately, was a terrible time to become an investment banker.
Yuying Deng:
I remember that time.
Daniel Callaghan:
So, in the end, I had to become an entrepreneur. My first business straight out of business school was a global freelance marketplace, which was Seedcamp-backed and is now called Talmix. It’s basically for high-end independent ex-McKinsey types on short-term projects all over the world. That business is running today and profitable, which is great.
Yuying Deng:
And you’re still a part of that?
Daniel Callaghan:
Yes, still a part of that. I moved to Singapore when Brexit was happening because I found the political situation there a little depressing. I came to Singapore where I ran the corporate venture arm across APAC for the world’s largest recruitment company. So, the Adecco Group was trying to go through this digital transformation around the future of work. My job was to go and look at all of the HR tech and future-of-work startups to see which ones they should invest in, buy, or try and utilize internally as well. I think it was there that I first really got to grips with the background screening world and pre-employment checks—one, how big a problem it is that companies really need to check the credentials of prospective hires, and two, just how poorly the status quo was at the time.
Yuying Deng:
Could you tell us a bit more about the status quo at that stage?
Daniel Callaghan:
Yeah, well, thankfully for Veremark, the whole industry was very antiquated. You had sort of three big players who were extremely US-focused. If you weren’t in America, and you were a UK company or an APAC company that wasn’t a big global bank, you were just forced to use very local, very mom-and-pop shops—very Excel and email-driven providers who really weren’t fit for a global, digital-first experience that candidates and regulations demand nowadays. The average net promoter score of a First Advantage or one of the big three that we see published in comparable sites is around minus 27.
Yuying Deng: Minus 27?
Daniel Callaghan:
Yeah, minus 27. So, we wrongly thought, “Well, we couldn’t do any worse,” and therefore decided to have a go at building Veremark. Thankfully, we’ve managed to pull it off so far.
Yuying Deng:
Could you briefly tell us how Veremark is different from all the legacy players that are out there?
Daniel Callaghan:
Well, people often say I’m not such a big believer in the unique selling proposition. I always think it’s a culmination of factors that truly makes a business great. As I mentioned, the large players are either heavily concentrated at one end with three very big players who are 90% US-centric, and every piece of technology they’ve built is really just designed for the US market. When you look at APAC, it’s a diverse market with different sorts of skills, countries, and regulations. The clients over here were very much the last on the list to receive any new technological innovations that came through the screening process.
So Veremark, from the very beginning, was designed for the APAC market first. We built it entirely from the candidate experience first, as opposed to from the client side, because we wanted to create a strong user experience. Our net promoter score is about 65 on the candidate side for completing the screening, and that’s just because we’ve designed it to make it super easy—entirely digital-first, mobile from the get-go. We don’t ask users to fax back pieces of paper, which some of the traditional firms still do. From a delivery perspective, we made it as automated and API-led as possible so that the turnaround times were faster, and there was less room for human error.
We boiled it down to four “S’s”: speed, simplicity, security, and service. We try to win—or do win—on all four of those levels.
Yuying Deng:
Very good, kind of like basic principles to have. I believe I did see your platform before when I was talking to someone at Veremark the first time. I was shown the platform, and it was super easy, a great user experience.
Daniel Callaghan:
Yes, I believe you’re a customer of ours too, so all good, quid pro quo. But yeah, it’s very easy. Background screening should not be complicated. It is, however, a regulatory or mandatory necessity for organizations. If you care about the culture of your workplace, and if you care about the environment that you want people to work in and their sense of safety, then it is also a best practice thing to do from a hiring perspective. The inconvenience is obviously trying to remember your graduation dates from 20 years ago or trying to retrieve the certificates.
Yuying Deng:
Yes, absolutely.
Daniel Callaghan:
So, we just looked at how to minimize that. One of the innovations we’ve subsequently brought to market is blockchain-based digital credentials. If you’ve had a check done with Veremark, like your education from 15 years ago, and we’ve verified it, we turn that into digital credentials. So, anyone who has been checked by Veremark need not go through that same pain again.
Yuying Deng:
That’s really useful, especially because you might be applying for a new job every two to three years, and having to pull up your certifications again and scan them is just a lot of work.
Daniel Callaghan:
Absolutely. If you think about the trends within the workforce and the tenure of the next generation that are coming through, people are staying in jobs for far less than two to three years now. The rise of the gig economy or portfolio careers means people are much more mobile and independent. So, being able to carry those instantly verifiable, instantly shareable proof points that you are as good as you say you are has always been a key part of the ethos around what we’re building at Veremark.
Yuying Deng:
Fantastic. We’ll dig into more later. One of the things I’ve noticed about Veremark, Daniel, is that your team is fully remote. You currently have 130 employees in 17 different countries, both in Europe, the US, and also APAC as well. So what inspired you to go with a distributed team setup from the beginning? Did you see any benefits to the approach before you even started?
Daniel Callaghan:
I’d love to be able to say it was by design. Veremark started in January 2020. It was myself and two co-founders, and the two co-founders were in London, so by default, we were remote, I suppose. Then, very shortly after leaving our corporate jobs to go into the startup world, COVID happened—March 2020, April. So, the world goes into lockdown. We have all these fresh ideas about how we’re going to build the business, and then the world remains that way for almost two years. So, we really had no other choice but to go remote.
I think it already helped that we were working abroad already, but also Singapore, where I’m based, is a relatively small island. So, you’re used to working on a more regional basis anyway. But, you know, as business picked up and the proposition took hold, and people could see the enhanced experience you could get through our platform, they came on board, and we had no choice but to start hiring wherever we could. Even if they were around the corner—I’m near Orchard, if they were just over in a different part of Singapore—we still had to be remote because no one was really allowed to go into the office.
Yuying Deng:
Have you ever thought about bringing people back into the office post-COVID?
Daniel Callaghan:
For us, it’s worked incredibly well. It’s almost been a blessing in disguise. If you’re forced into the situation that we were, I mean, we certainly wouldn’t have done it otherwise. We would have been much more traditional in our thinking, and we would have got a desk and incurred all of that cost that comes with having a fixed premises. For us, it’s worked economically extremely well, but it’s also created and instilled a culture of output first.
We have four values we build the company around, and one of those is “people and promises,” which essentially means we say what we mean and we do what we say. In turn, that means people are accountable for delivering against what they’ve committed to. Not having any sort of presentism and just saying, “Okay, here’s what we need to do, and these are the KPIs,” has helped us move faster. It’s ultimately created a better set of results generally.
Yuying Deng:
So, a lot of agency and leeway is given to people to manage their own time, as long as they know what the results are, right?
Daniel Callaghan:
Exactly. People have to be held accountable, and as long as you’re clear and communicating what those expectations are, then the ability to have a tough conversation, if needed, is based on facts rather than personal feelings.
Yuying Deng:
Given that you have such a distributed workforce, what challenges did you encounter while managing a remote team? How did you address them?
Daniel Callaghan:
Getting people to take ownership is one challenge. We certainly went through a learning curve where we had to structure interviews and hiring processes to determine whether a person had the right self-discipline to work in a remote environment. Is this person really going to do what they say they’re going to do, or are they going to be moonlighting or side-jobbing? All of those are things that you do when you’re in a more traditional interview, but because you’re no longer physically there and can’t get a sense of presence from that person, we had to adapt our thinking and processes.
We also look for certain traits—people who have shown a sense of self-discipline throughout their careers or who have taken up hobbies that require consistency and process. And of course, strong communication skills, because as a remote team, you have to almost over-communicate. You need to constantly explain and repeat things to make sure people understand exactly what’s going on.
Yuying Deng:
You mentioned earlier that you have four core values that guide your company. Could you elaborate on how you ensure that your team stays connected and aligned with those values, especially in a remote setup?
Daniel Callaghan:
We aspire to get it right. The way we try to do it is through sheer repetition. We start every town hall with a reminder of our values and why we’re doing what we’re doing. As I mentioned earlier, our mission as a company is to help create safer and more trusted workplaces. We communicate that, and we hire against it. We reward against it too. We have quarterly “Rockstar Awards” where peers recommend others who have excelled in embodying our values. They win a cash prize and some extra holiday time. We also have an annual award for those who represent all of our values.
Performance reviews are done against those values, and we make sure to justify any course of action we take by relating it back to our values. We try to make sure that other people are recognized for embodying those values as well, and hopefully, that reinforcement carries through.
Yuying Deng:
When did these values come into being? Was this at the very inception of Veremark, or did it develop further along the way?
Daniel Callaghan:
It was pretty early on, probably when we were around 10 people. We knew the importance of setting the right culture and tone early on. If we were going to continue down this remote path, we needed something that would bind us together. Hiring against a broad set of cultural differences, we needed common traits and virtues to bring everyone together.
Those values remain the same today as they were four years ago. We asked the team last year whether they still aligned with the values, and they agreed they were still the right ones. Our four values are “people and promises,” “trust is a must,” “data first,” and “experience matters.”
Yuying Deng:
That’s great! You also mentioned earlier that you bring new team members on board. What’s your process for onboarding and offboarding remote employees securely?
Daniel Callaghan:
We’re lucky to have a great partner for IT procurement and services, which is Esevel. That partnership has helped a lot. We also invested early in a proper HR team to ensure employment laws and contracts were up to spec. Early on, we developed an onboarding process that included getting people connected with a buddy, trained, and introduced to me. We use platforms to facilitate and automate the process now, but initially, it was just an Excel sheet with checkboxes.
When it comes to offboarding, security is a big concern. We have an internal process for securely retrieving equipment and ensuring access is revoked properly.
Yuying Deng:
Background screening is critical for remote employees. Why is it particularly important for companies hiring remotely to get the backgrounds of their hires checked?
Daniel Callaghan:
In many industries, background screening is a regulatory requirement. Financial services, for instance, must do it. In other industries, it’s more of a best practice. Statistics show that around one in four people misrepresent facts on their CV. If you’re an organization with remote employees, you don’t have the physical presence to gauge behavior or trust. Background screening is really about minimizing risk. It’s about ensuring that the people handling your data or money are trustworthy.
Remote work also extends that risk, as you don’t have physical oversight. You need to ensure that employees in different regions, especially where you may not be familiar with local norms or regulations, are properly vetted.
Yuying Deng:
What types of checks do you conduct? Is it just educational qualifications, or does it extend to things like credit checks or past employment?
Daniel Callaghan:
We typically check past employment, education, criminal records, and for financial roles, we also check credit scores or bankruptcy status. For regulated industries, we do global sanctions and adverse media checks, which ensure that candidates aren’t on anti-money laundering lists or are politically exposed persons.
Yuying Deng:
And you’re able to do this across many countries?
Daniel Callaghan:
Yes, we’re able to do this across 180+ countries.
Yuying Deng:
Wow, impressive. What about your turnaround time? A lot of startups and SMEs I know want someone onboarded quickly. Can you do it in days?
Daniel Callaghan:
Some checks can be done in seconds, but it depends on the country and type of check. Some countries are more digitally advanced, while others may require more manual processes. But in general, we’ve built our platform to ensure fast turnaround times.
Yuying Deng:
You also mentioned a whistleblowing service earlier. Could you tell us briefly what that’s about?
Daniel Callaghan:
Sure. We help create safer and trusted workplaces, and while background screening helps ensure the right people are hired, whistleblowing provides employees with a way to anonymously report issues they encounter. Whether it’s harassment, bribery, or other unethical behavior, our whistleblowing platform allows team members to raise concerns anonymously, and the company can track and assign cases to the appropriate departments. It’s regulatory in many countries, and having a secure, auditable platform for handling these reports is crucial.
Yuying Deng:
That’s really interesting! Looking ahead, Daniel, what do you think the future of remote work looks like? Will it become mainstream?
Daniel Callaghan:
I think the genie is very much out of the bottle. The extreme form of remote work we saw during COVID is unsustainable, but a hybrid model is here to stay. Some jobs require physical presence, but for most white-collar workers, I think we’ll see a 60% hybrid setup—three days remote, two days in the office. Long-term, I think we’ll move toward a more remote-first model as technology progresses.
Yuying Deng:
I completely agree. We got back from a team lead retreat in Malaysia about a month ago, and it was just so productive to have everyone in the same place. But at the same time, I did feel it wasn’t necessary to have that 100% of the time. Maybe every quarter, you could meet up, set strategic goals, and everyone just goes back and works on it remotely.
Daniel Callaghan:
Absolutely. I think quarterly meetups for strategic planning and collaboration will become the norm. Remote work allows flexibility, but face-to-face time is essential for certain aspects like brainstorming and connecting with colleagues.
Yuying Deng:
Thank you so much, Daniel. I’ve learned a lot from you, especially the importance of compliance for remote work. It wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind as a founder of a startup, but as the company grows, it becomes vital to ensure that trust is backed by verifiable facts. Where can our listeners find you?
Daniel Callaghan:
You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to answer any questions or offer insights.
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