Know your employeeKYE

Verifying the people you hire, contract, or grant access to.

Before a new employee or contractor gets a laptop, an email account, or system access, the company confirms they are who they say they are and that their background checks out.

Identity verification combined with background checks, such as criminal history, right-to-work status, and credential verification, applied before granting a worker or contractor system access. Right-to-work status is whether a person is legally allowed to work in a given country, and credential verification confirms claims such as degrees and licenses.

Know your employee (KYE) typically combines several checks:

• Identity verification, which confirms that the person is who they claim to be, often with an ID document, a selfie, and a liveness check.
• Background checks, which review criminal history where the law allows.
• Right-to-work checks, which confirm legal eligibility to work.
• Credential and reference checks, which confirm education, licenses, and past employment.
• Screening, which checks the person against sanctions lists.

A remote hiring flow with KYE might look like this:

1. The candidate applies and interviews.
2. Before an offer takes effect, the company verifies the candidate's identity.
3. Background and eligibility checks run.
4. The company grants access only after the checks pass, and may verify again at key moments.

KYE sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Identity verification (IDV) is the check inside KYE that confirms who the person is.
• Know your customer (KYC) applies the same idea to customers instead of workers.
• Background check reviews a person's history, but it does not by itself confirm that the person being checked is the person in the interview.

For more, see North Korean Defector Reveals Inside Story of State-Sponsored Candidate Fraud.