The candidate looks great on paper. Verify the paper.
A C-suite finalist whose CV claims three exits. A senior IC whose GitHub history needs to match the deep-engineering claim. A board candidate whose governance record across five companies is the spine of the pitch. Public records hold all of that. We assemble them into a report your search team or in-house TA leader can read in five minutes — before the offer letter goes out, before the second-round panel, and before the candidate goes to the client.
Why this is harder than it should be
Three things have shifted in the recruiter's diligence environment over the past decade. First, references are softer. Hiring managers, alumni colleagues, and former managers are unwilling to say anything negative on the record because of legal exposure and because professional networks are smaller and more porous than they were. A candidate's reference list returns three thoughtful and uniformly warm calls, every time. The signal-to-noise ratio of the reference call has collapsed. Second, the candidate's own publishing surface — LinkedIn, Twitter, personal sites, conference talks — is heavily curated. The candidate is fluent in their own narrative. Reading the candidate from their own surfaces is reading their pitch, not their record. Third, employer-side reputation signal is fragmented. The companies the candidate worked for know things, but those things sit in private exit-interview notes, severance agreements, and folklore. None of it surfaces in the diligence window.
The fourth shift, less obvious but more consequential: the pace has compressed. A retained search closes in twelve weeks. A contingent recruiter places in three. A senior IC role decision happens in two weeks of interview cycles. The amount of time available for diligence has dropped while the number of public records you would want to read has increased. A search consultant who hand-assembles a candidate dossier from public records is doing two days of work per finalist. Most search firms cannot afford that on more than the top one or two candidates. Most contingent recruiters do not do it at all.
The result is a market where the candidate's pitch is louder than the candidate's record, and the recruiter is making placement decisions on incomplete information at speed. That is fine when the placement works. When it breaks — wrong-company-claim discovered after placement, governance-role exaggeration surfaced after seat acceptance, prior-litigation pattern that should have been visible — the fall-out is expensive. The placement reverses, the firm credit is consumed, and the candidate's record gets a new line of dispute that is in nobody's interest.
A public-record vetting report does not solve all of this. It does the part that public records can reach. It compresses what a careful researcher would assemble in a week into roughly five minutes of reading, with cited sources and defamation-aware framing. The recruiter still does reference calls, still does the panel interviews, still uses their judgment. They do it on a fuller picture.
What MentionFox brings to recruiter and search workflows
The Recruiter Den is the workspace. The Founder Vetter and Executive Vetter handle the candidate-claim verification work. The methodology pages document the source taxonomy and confidence framework. Compare runs side-by-side finalist analysis.
Recruiter Den
The dedicated workspace for executive search, retained search, and contingent recruiters. Talent CRM with stealth-by-default candidate communication, kill-or-save requisition board, candidate evaluator with template-driven rubrics, bulk compare for finalist slates, competing-offer radar, and the cold-start panel for first-day-on-the-platform setup. The Den is tier-aware: Pro recruiters get a single Den, Agency tier gets two, Enterprise gets five Dens active across the team. The retained-search workflow, the agency-recruiter workflow, and the in-house TA workflow each have their own widget set within the Den.
Founder Vetter
The flagship report for any candidate who claims founder, co-founder, exited-startup, or operator-status work. Cross-checks Crunchbase, AngelList, ProductHunt, GitHub, LinkedIn, the press surface, and the patent record against the candidate's stated history. Snapshot tier returns in roughly two minutes with the verified company-of-record, role, founding date, and headline traction. Full report covers cap-table presence where public, technical contribution, prior co-founder relationships, prior funding history, and prior litigation surface. Built for the case where the candidate's own startup story is the central recruiting pitch.
Executive Vetter
The flagship report for senior executive candidates. Twelve sections in the full report: prior leadership history with reporting-line traceback, governance roles via SEC and IRS Form 990 filings, board and committee positions, prior employer disciplinary surface where public, public-conduct record from the press archive, M&A history, conflict-of-interest exposure, and the same defamation-aware framing. The right tier when the search firm brief needs to be supplemented with a public-record diligence layer before the offer letter or board recommendation.
Founder Methodology
The full source taxonomy and confidence framework behind every Founder Vetting Report. Federal-Primary sources (USPTO, SEC, NIH) carry the highest weight. Authoritative-Secondary sources include Crunchbase, AngelList, ProductHunt, and OpenAlex. Aggregator and forum sources are signal, never verdict. Unverified claims are tagged. The disambiguation hard-gate prevents wrong-person reports. Read this to understand exactly what the Founder Vetter does and does not assert.
Executive Methodology
Companion methodology for the Executive Vetting Report. Source taxonomy extends to SEC EDGAR governance filings, IRS Form 990 board-position records, AGB association filings, prior public-company executive registers, and the press archive. Defamation guardrails are explicit. The hard-gate prevents the wrong-Smith report when senior executives share names with other public figures.
Use case — Hiring a Board Member
The detailed vertical use case for board-recruiter and corporate-governance work. Walks through the public-record surface for a board candidate: prior board seats, board-chair history, governance committee positions, prior public-company D and O exposure, and the conflict-of-interest checks that a thorough governance counsel will want to see before recommending the seat. Useful as a reading reference for nominating-committee work as well as for board-search firms.
A typical workflow — what a search consultant actually does
A retained-search consultant has narrowed a chief-revenue-officer search to three finalists. The client board meets in eight days. The consultant has each finalist's CV, two reference calls per finalist already complete, and the back-channel impressions of two industry contacts she trusts. She wants a public-record diligence layer to round out the picture before the board presentation.
She runs an Executive Vetting Report on each finalist for 200 credits per report — 600 credits total — over the course of an afternoon. Five to eight minutes per report return time. The first finalist comes back with a clean public record across twelve sections, a verifiable revenue trajectory at the prior employer, and a publication and conference-talk history that matches the technical narrative in the CV. The second finalist comes back with a governance role at a public company that was not disclosed in the candidate intake, and a brief press-surface mention from three years ago of a regulatory matter at a former employer that the consultant had not seen. The third finalist comes back clean on the public record but with a thinner-than-expected governance and conference history, which is consistent with a candidate who is genuinely in the deep-operator track and underweights public-facing activity.
None of this changes the consultant's recommendation by itself. What it changes is the conversation with the candidate before the board meeting. The second finalist's governance role gets disclosed and explained. The regulatory press surface gets contextualized. The board presentation is now built on a fuller record. If the second finalist's explanations hold, the consultant has a stronger candidate to recommend; if they do not, she has avoided a reversal.
What she did not do: spend two days hand-assembling each candidate's public record. The reports did the assembly. She did the reading and the calls.
What data sources the report draws from
Every claim in a Founder or Executive Vetting Report is anchored to a named, public, verifiable source. The methodology pages list every source class and how it is weighted. For recruiter and search-firm work specifically, these are the sources that drive the report.
- LinkedIn public surface — career timeline cross-reference. Used to confirm that the candidate's stated history is consistent with what they have published about themselves on the canonical professional surface. The report cites the public profile URL, never scrapes private-network content.
- Crunchbase — venture-funding and company-record database. Verifies named companies, founding dates, funding rounds, founder rosters, executive-team rosters, and acquisition history.
- AngelList — startup roster, syndicate participation, founder profiles, fund GP listings. Cross-references with Crunchbase to surface inconsistencies in the founder or executive-team history.
- ProductHunt — public launch surface for shipped products. Verifies launch dates, traction signal, and founder attribution for candidates whose recruiting pitch is built on shipped-product credit.
- GitHub public commit history — verifies technical-contribution claims for senior-engineering candidates and engineering-leader candidates whose CV claims hands-on work.
- USPTO patent and trademark database — federal record of patent applications, grants, and trademark registrations. Used for candidates who claim invention or named-inventor credit on prior products.
- SEC EDGAR — federal corporate-disclosure database. Surfaces governance roles, executive-officer disclosures, board positions, and ownership stakes for candidates with public-company history.
- IRS Form 990 records — federal nonprofit-disclosure filings. Verifies board-chair, board-member, and officer roles for candidates who cite nonprofit governance experience.
- CourtListener — federal and state court docket aggregator. Civil-litigation surface by name and prior-employer association. Framed as litigation activity, never adjudicated wrongdoing. Strong defamation guardrails apply.
- Press archive via NewsAPI and Google News — long-tail press surface for executive-public-conduct review and prior-employer-context cross-reference.
- OpenAlex and PubMed — for academic and research-credentialed candidates. Publication record, citation depth, co-author network.
- NIH RePORTER — for candidates with named-investigator or principal-investigator history on federal grants.
Federal-Primary sources carry the highest weight. Authoritative-Secondary sources include Crunchbase, AngelList, ProductHunt, GitHub, and OpenAlex. Aggregator sites are signal, not verdict. Unverified claims are tagged, not laundered. The methodology page is the long-form version of this list.
Sample report walkthroughs
The canonical executive-recruiter sample is Brian Chesky, co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb, prior leadership at the same company, public board positions, and a long press surface. The full Executive Vetting Report runs the entire source taxonomy and the founder-history overlay since the subject has both founder and senior-leadership records.
For a founder-track sample suitable as a reading reference for early-stage operator hires, see the Dario Amodei Founder Vetting Report. For a small-company founder reference contrast, see the Saul Fleischman Founder Vetting Report.
Pricing for this use case
Founder Snapshot
30 credits. Returns in roughly two minutes. Verified company-of-record, founding date, role, headline traction signal, top public-record consistency check. The right tier for early-funnel candidate triage where the founder claim is the central recruiting pitch and the recruiter wants a fast consistency check before deeper investment.
Founder Vetting Report v2
200 credits. Returns in five to eight minutes. Full source taxonomy across twelve sections. Cap-table presence where public, technical-contribution detail, prior co-founder relationships, prior funding history, prior litigation surface, public-conduct surface, defamation-aware framing. The right tier for finalist-stage diligence on operator candidates whose entrepreneurship history is central.
Executive Vetting Report
200 credits. Returns in five to eight minutes. Tuned for senior-executive finalists. Prior leadership history, governance roles, board positions, prior employer disciplinary surface where public, M&A history, public-conduct record, conflict-of-interest exposure. The right tier when the search firm brief needs supplementation before the offer or before the board recommendation.
Volume packs and agency tiers
Credit packs scale to retained-search and agency volume. Agency tiers include the multi-Den workspace and the team-shared candidate library. Enterprise tiers add custom rubric templates, the institutional comparison library, and white-label delivery to the end client. See the full pricing page for credit-pack options and tier comparison.
Mini case studies
The retained executive search firm placing a chief revenue officer
A retained search firm has the chief-revenue-officer mandate for a series-C software company. Three finalists. Eight days to the board recommendation. The lead consultant runs Executive Vetting Reports on each finalist for 600 credits total. The reports arrive within twenty minutes in aggregate. One finalist's prior public-company governance role surfaces a footnote the consultant had not seen. The candidate intake call adds the missing context, the role is recommended with disclosure, and the board accepts. The consultant treats the report as standard finalist diligence going forward.
The contingent agency recruiter triaging a senior IC pipeline
A contingent recruiter handling deep-engineering placements runs a Founder Snapshot on every senior-IC candidate whose CV cites a startup founding role. Thirty credits per snapshot. Across a week she runs forty snapshots for 1,200 credits. Three return inconsistencies severe enough to deprioritize the candidate without a follow-up call. Two return inconsistencies that turn into productive intake conversations where the candidate clarifies a misstated role. The remaining thirty-five return clean. The triage stage of her workflow gets sharper without adding interview hours.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a search firm or recruiter need a public-record vetting report?
Because reference checks have become non-confrontational, social media is curated, and employer-side reputation systems do not surface unflattering signal until after a placement breaks down. A public-record vetting report compresses what a careful researcher would assemble in a week into a five-to-eight-minute reading document, with cited sources and defamation-aware framing.
Where does the data come from?
Crunchbase, AngelList, ProductHunt, GitHub, LinkedIn public surface, the press archive via NewsAPI and Google News, USPTO records, SEC EDGAR for governance disclosures, IRS Form 990 records, OpenAlex for academic credentials, and CourtListener for civil litigation surface. Federal sources carry the highest weight.
Is this a substitute for a background check?
No. A consumer-reporting-act background check is a distinct artifact that follows the candidate-consent process and pulls credit and criminal records. The public-record vetting report supplements that process with shipped-product, governance, prior-leadership, and public-conduct verification that a background check does not cover.
Will the candidate know we ran a report?
No. Reports are private to the buying firm. Candidates are not notified that a report was run on them. The report cites only public records the candidate or their employers have already published.
What does it cost?
A Founder Snapshot is 30 credits and returns in roughly two minutes. A full Founder Vetting Report v2 is 200 credits. The Executive Vetting Report is 200 credits. Volume credit packs are available, with retained-search and agency tiers documented on the pricing page.
Can the candidate dispute the report?
Every claim in the report cites the source URL it came from. If the candidate believes a public-record citation is incorrect, the source URL is the place to begin. The methodology page documents the disambiguation hard-gate, the four-class source taxonomy, and the defamation framework that governs how allegations are framed.
How does this fit alongside Compare and Mass Compare?
Compare runs side-by-side analysis on a small finalist slate. Mass Compare runs the same workflow at scale across a larger candidate pool. Both consume the same vetting reports as input. Use vetting for depth on a single candidate; use Compare and Mass Compare to evaluate finalists against each other or to triage a longer list.
What is the defamation framework?
Reports use a four-class source taxonomy and a probability yardstick adapted from the UK Professional Head of Intelligence Assessment framework. Civil-litigation citations are framed as litigation activity, never as adjudicated wrongdoing. Aggregator and forum sources are signal, never verdict. The methodology page is published in full.