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There is a growing digital risk signal visibility gap in recruitment and workforce integrity. Traditional checks do not always surface relevant digital exposure, behavioural risk, or online activity that may be material to safeguarding, workforce risk, insider risk or other high-trust access decisions. These checks could include DBS (or equivalent) and BPSS, credit checks, and employment references and history. At a time when the digital risk surface around people has become far more complex, fragmented and difficult to assess, searches are often conducted by untrained HR personnel, while those conducted in a traditional manner by professional vetting staff might cost £1,500 per search.
Safehire.ai was founded by Simon Holden, a former school bursar and cybersecurity founder who saw first-hand the digital risk visibility gap facing education, and Sean Lumley, a serial technology entrepreneur and co-founder of human risk management and behavioural cybersecurity platform CybSafe. The pair first met as British Army officers, a shared background that has helped shape the company’s intelligence-led approach to Digital Risk Screening.
Safehire.ai’s methodology draws on military intelligence analytical processes, combining large language model capability trained around those methods with human verification by ex-military intelligence-trained analysts.
Safehire.ai’s Digital Risk Screening (DRS) platform first searches open-source data on the surface, deep and dark web, then applies AI-enriched context to the raw data before finally integrating human analyst verification to produce evidence‑based digital intelligence packaged into easy-to-understand background risk reports. DRS enables organisations to conduct over 10,000 searches per day, instead of the 15 searches a single human analyst can achieve, and at a fraction of the cost. One large, multi-academy trust reported that using Safehire.ai DRS checks saved their HR team members on average 1hr per candidate, speeding up recruitment, while providing a level of assurance it could not get elsewhere.
Safehire.ai CEO, Simon Holden, said,
“Safehire challenges the idea that traditional checks are enough. By looking beyond the surface, we help organisations identify hidden risk, strengthen safeguarding and make high-trust decisions with greater confidence. This investment allows us to scale Digital Risk Screening beyond education, support larger enterprise use cases, develop our insider risk capability and prepare for expansion into other jurisdictions.”
About Safehire.ai
Safehire.ai provides Digital Risk Screening for high-trust hiring, safeguarding and workforce assurance decisions. Its platform helps organisations identify relevant digital risk signals across surface, deep and dark web sources, with findings reviewed by human analysts before being reported.
Safehire.ai supports organisations that need proportionate, defensible visibility into people-related digital risk, while complementing - not replacing - statutory checks, regulated screening, references or human judgement.
Website: www.safehire.ai
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