A senior hire arrives with a history that a CV compresses into a few clean lines. This engagement concerned what those lines left out, and how much of a candidate’s past a standard reference check never reaches.
At a glance
Challenge Briefing
The candidate came recommended — not by a search firm, but by several of the company's own senior executives.
That is the hardest kind of screening to run well. An internal referral arrives pre-endorsed, the check that follows is a formality in everyone's mind, and the person commissioning it is implicitly questioning colleagues' judgment. The COO of a North American financial services company asked us to run it properly anyway, on a top-level appointment, with five business days before the decision had to be made.
Five days is short for this work. It is short enough that it does not compress the method — it replaces it.
How we worked it
Our standard approach to a senior appointment leans on human sources: former colleagues, counterparties, people who worked under the subject rather than beside them. That takes weeks, and the time was not available here, so we said so at the outset and re-planned around what five days could genuinely deliver. Telling a client which method you have had to abandon is part of the report, not a caveat to it.
We opened with a broad, cheap first pass whose only job was to tell us where to aim the expensive effort. It surfaced allegations of embezzlement and financial crime investigations in Latin America — not in any court index, but in social media and regional news outlets that standard screening databases do not index.
That set the geography, and the geography is what made the deadline survivable. Instead of running a generic global search, we ran public record searches across Latin American jurisdictions scoped tightly to those two specific risks.
Alongside it we reviewed the subject's own online presence in full — not only text, but images, video, and comment histories, including material posted years earlier under looser privacy assumptions. This is routinely where the connective tissue sits. A photograph can place two people in the same room long before any document establishes a relationship between them.
What emerged was a pattern of alleged involvement in fraudulent activity tied to a group operating internationally and linked to multiple embezzlement schemes — and a connection between the subject and that group's leadership in Argentina.
The remaining time went on the part that actually matters. An allegation found online is a lead, not a finding, and the failure mode of fast screening is reporting the first as though it were the second. We spent the back half of the engagement corroborating each item against official records and establishing that the individuals named in different sources were in fact the same people. We delivered on the deadline, and we separated what we could stand behind from what we could not.
The client did not appoint the candidate.
What it changed
The company avoided placing a person with an unresolved financial crime history into a senior role in a regulated financial services business.
The second-order costs are the ones worth naming, because they are what the fee is actually measured against. An appointment like that cannot simply be reversed, and unwinding one brings a regulatory notification, a disclosure question for every client and counterparty, an internal review of every decision the person touched, and a permanent entry in the company's history that surfaces in the due diligence other people run on it for years afterward.
There is a quieter result too. Several senior executives had personally recommended this candidate. The screening tested more than the candidate; it tested the assumption that a strong internal referral is itself a form of diligence, which it is not. A referral tells you that someone was impressive in the settings where they were observed, which is precisely the information a person with something to conceal is best placed to manage.
Take this with you
What you can establish before commissioning anything
- Do the dates and titles on the CV match what the companies' own filings and archived websites say? Overlaps and quiet promotions are common and usually innocent — but they are cheap to check.
- Does the person appear in the corporate registry of every jurisdiction they claim to have operated in, as director, shareholder, or officer? Absence from those registers is as informative as presence in them.
- Search in the languages of the countries they worked in. English-language screening misses regional press almost entirely, which is exactly where this case turned.
- Is there a version of their online presence older than their current professional profile? Names, affiliations, and associations tend to be stated far more freely earlier on.
- Are there gaps the CV explains in general terms — consulting, a family business, a sabbatical — without naming anything checkable?
- Who is vouching for them, and what did that person actually observe: the work, or the reputation?
None of this requires an investigator. It requires someone to be given the time to do it and the standing to report an awkward answer — which, on an internally referred candidate, is the part that usually fails.
When to bring someone in
When the role carries signing authority, regulated responsibility, or access to client money — and especially when the candidate's history sits largely outside your own jurisdiction, where your instincts and your networks do not reach. One honest limit is worth stating plainly: five days is enough to find and corroborate serious adverse information. It is not enough to establish that someone is clean. Those are different questions, and the second one takes human sources and weeks. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you the first answer with the second one's label on it.
Talk to us about this case study. Schedule a call now.
Falcone International
A similar problem?
We handle corporate investigations, due diligence, financial investigations and duty of care — usually for people who need something established quietly, and established properly, before it turns into a problem.