How Checkr Got 98% of Employees to Complete Security Training with Adaptive Security

“I've learned the hard way that the tools with good content are sometimes a nightmare for the people managing them. I was skeptical of Adaptive at first, and we took our time switching entirely to it, but I'm very happy with the decision. It offers fantastic content while also being easy to manage.”

About Checkr

Checkr is the AI-native verification platform built for high-stakes decisions. Founded in 2014, it began in background checks for hiring and has grown into a verification platform that helps organizations make faster, safer, and fairer decisions about the people they work with. Powered by Checkr AI, it turns fragmented, hard-to-verify data into clear answers to the questions behind consequential choices, whether a company is hiring an employee, a lender is approving a loan, an insurer is clearing a driver, or a landlord is screening a tenant. Today, Checkr serves more than 140,000 customers of every size and across every industry.

A company whose business is verifying identity and powering trust is itself a high-value target. Checkr handles some of the most sensitive personal information an organization ever touches, and safeguarding it is inseparable from the promise it makes to the people and businesses that rely on its decisions. That responsibility sits with a Trust and Security team that treats employee security awareness as a core part of protecting the data in its care.

Challenge

The trade-off between content people like and a backend an admin can live with

Hanna Dobrynski has spent four years on Checkr's Trust and Security team, where she runs security operations along with security awareness training, brand monitoring, and the audit-driven training requirements that come with working in a regulated industry. For years, running that training meant living with a trade-off she had never been able to solve. The platforms with content employees actually engaged with tended to have clunky, painful backends, and the ones that were easy to administer put people to sleep.

On top of that, Checkr's phishing simulations were not keeping pace. The templates from its legacy tools were easy to spot as tests, which limited how much they could really teach a security-savvy, technical workforce.

The Turning Point

Seeing Conan in the platform and realizing she could stop choosing

Checkr adopted Adaptive in deliberate stages, and each step built the team's confidence in the platform. It started with phishing simulations, driven by OSINT-based lures and a deepfake video of their own CEO that Adaptive produced for training, something Checkr had been trying to build on its own. That early success made expanding onto Adaptive for security awareness training a natural next step.

Once training moved onto Adaptive, the program found its defining moment almost by accident. Hanna had already built out a training program there when she came across the Conan O'Brien content while working on something else. She switched course on the spot and rebuilt the year's training around Conan in about a week.

Solution

Content employees talk about, a backend she can automate, and phishing that finally looks real

The content is what got Checkr's people to actually pay attention. The Conan O'Brien training became a genuine topic of conversation around the company, with employees asking whether it was AI-generated. Engagement that used to be a battle turned into something people brought up on their own.

Underneath the content, the backend finally worked the way Hanna needed it to. Native Slack notifications, which her previous vendor kept behind a premium tier, brought training reminders into the tool employees already live in. The platform's API became her biggest time saver, letting her pull completion data and drive manager follow-ups automatically instead of chasing people by hand.

Ease of use showed up everywhere, including where it usually does not. Where past rollouts meant a steady stream of employees stuck on videos that would not play or labs that would not load, this one ran clean.

On the phishing side, the realism Hanna had wanted paid off. Adaptive's templates looked far closer to real attacks than the obvious tests Checkr had run before, and pairing that realism with steady training is what moved the numbers.

Results

A record completion rate, a steep drop in phishing failure, and time she used to spend chasing people

Checkr reached over 98% on-time completion on its latest security awareness campaign, a level Hanna had never hit with any previous tool. Just as telling as the number was how it happened. Employees moved through the training quickly and without prompting, and the program that produced it was stood up in roughly a week.

The phishing results moved just as sharply. Across two quarters, Checkr's phishing failure rate fell about 74%, driven by simulations realistic enough to actually teach rather than tests employees could spot on sight.

The change shows up in the culture, too. More employees now flag suspicious messages to the security team on their own, often forwarding an email directly with a quick note asking someone to take a look, rather than letting it sit. For Hanna, that shift from passive to proactive is one of the clearest signs the program is working.

The program also gave Hanna back time she used to lose to manual work. Pulling data through the API and automating manager outreach replaced the hand-tracking and chasing that used to eat her week, and the clean rollout meant she was not spending it on support tickets either. For a company entrusted with millions of people's personal data, a workforce that finishes its training and reports what looks wrong is a direct investment in the trust its business depends on.