US Recruitment Compliance by Sector — What Staffing Agencies Track

THE FEDERAL LAYER

Six items every US placement carries.

Whatever the sector, the same federal paperwork sits underneath. It is short, it is uniform across all fifty states, and two items in it have rules that catch people out badly enough to be worth spelling out.

Form I‑9 and work authorization

The completed I‑9 itself, plus the work authorization expiry — the date that genuinely has to be chased, taken from the employee's own entry in Section 1 rather than from whatever document was shown in Section 2.

Form W‑4

Held with the file. No expiry, no re-check — but its absence is the sort of thing an audit finds instantly, so it belongs on the list rather than in somebody's memory.

The background check pack

The FCRA disclosure and the signed authorization, then the report itself. Two artifacts, one record: the agency holds the signed pack, and the report arrives afterward or not at all.

The I‑9 rule that software gets wrong. An employer may not demand a particular document. The employee chooses which unexpired List A, or List B and List C, document to present, and requiring a specific one is an unfair documentary practice. So our US starter sets never name “Social Security Card” or “Permanent Resident Card” as a required document type. They carry the record, the date worth chasing, and a generic Identity Document (List B) slot — optional, and recorded rather than demanded. A compliance list that insists on a named document is not being thorough; it is being unlawful.

The FCRA rule that forms get wrong. The disclosure has to stand alone. It cannot sit inside the application form alongside other text, and the authorization is separately signed. That is why the pack is one record with two signed pieces rather than a checkbox on a form.

SECTOR BY SECTOR

The eight sector layers.

Each of these sits on top of the federal six. Every item listed is in the starter set that ships today, and every one of them is yours to rename, remove or add to.

Healthcare and social care

State professional license carrying its own license number. Exclusion list screening against the OIG LEIE, federal SAM and the Medicaid list of each state placed into. NPI number, DEA registration where relevant, immunization record, TB screening, influenza vaccination, BLS certification and N95 fit test — the last four on annual cycles.

The trap: exclusion screening is not a document and has no expiry date. It is a check, a date and a result, and it has to run monthly. Modeling it as a certificate with a renewal date produces a register that looks compliant and is not. ATS Engine gives it a 30‑day re‑check cadence rather than an expiry, which is the difference between the two.

Education

State teaching certificate, FBI fingerprint check, state criminal history check, child abuse registry check, sex offender registry check, mandated reporter training.

The trap: fingerprint-based FBI plus state criminal history is the one check common to every US jurisdiction — but roughly a third of states re‑screen employed staff every three to five years, and the rest do not. That is an organization setting, not a national default, so we ship it without a cadence and let you set the one your states actually require.

Early years and childcare

State childcare certification, FBI fingerprint check, child abuse registry check, pediatric first aid, CPR certification, immunization record.

The trap: pediatric first aid and CPR run on their own cycles, independent of everything else in the file and of each other. They are the items that lapse unnoticed, because they are the only ones that do not arrive with the background check.

Construction and trades

OSHA 10 card, OSHA 30 for supervisory work, state contractor license where the role requires one, and the E‑Verify case result.

The trap: E‑Verify is mandated for federal contractors and by a number of states, and is neither universal nor the agency's choice. It ships optional for exactly that reason — a desk placing into a state that mandates it marks it required in one click, and a desk that does not is not nagged about a check it has no business running.

Energy, oil and gas, offshore

TWIC card with its number, offshore medical, HUET or water survival training, OSHA 10.

The trap: a TWIC is a federal credential with an enrollment appointment and a processing wait behind it. It is not something a candidate can produce in the week the assignment starts, which makes it the one item on this list where knowing the expiry three months out is worth more than knowing it on the day.

Driving, transport and logistics

The Driver Qualification File, and the best-shaped regime in the whole US picture: commercial driver license, DOT medical examiner certificate, motor vehicle record, annual certification of violations, Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse query, pre-employment drug test, safety performance history, road test certificate.

The trap: three of those — the MVR, the certification of violations and the Clearinghouse query — are annual recurring checks with no certificate at the end of them. They are a cadence, not an expiry, and every interval in our starter set is the published FMCSA figure rather than a guess. This is the one US regime that is federally uniform and does not vary by state.

Financial services

FINRA Form U4, fingerprint check, state insurance license where the role carries one.

The trap: a U4 is a filing that has to be kept current, not a certificate that runs out. Reportable events require an amendment, and the obligation attaches to a change in circumstances rather than to a date in a calendar. Anything that only knows how to watch expiry dates will never raise it.

Security-cleared and public sector

Federal background investigation, clearance level, fingerprint check — each carrying its own reference.

The trap: clearance is sponsored. It can end because a contract ended rather than because a date passed, and continuous vetting has replaced the fixed periodic reinvestigation for much of the cleared population. “When does it expire” is frequently the wrong question, which is why the clearance level is recorded as a credential with a reference rather than as a certificate on a timer.

THE COMMON SHAPE

Eight regimes, three shapes.

Set the eight side by side and the underlying mechanism barely varies. Almost every item above is one of three things, and a compliance register that handles all three handles the lot.

A dated certificate

Issued once, valid for a fixed period, then worthless. A DOT medical examiner certificate, a BLS card, a TWIC.

A status re-checked on a cadence

Not a date that runs out but a position that has to be looked at again. OIG and SAM screening monthly, the Clearinghouse query annually. Treating one of these as an expiry date gets it wrong in the direction that costs money.

A credential with a category

The number alone is not the qualification. A license has a state. A CDL has endorsements. Two people can hold the same credential and be cleared for different work — and in the US, for work in different places.

Which is why the hard part of compliance software was never knowing what a TWIC is. It is having one mechanism that handles a renewal cycle, a re‑check cadence and a category, and then filling it with the right content per sector. The regimes are content. The engine underneath them is the same — which is also why the eight British regimes run on exactly the same code.

THE HONEST PART

Why we do not ship you a state layer.

Licensure, ban‑the‑box timing, drug‑testing legality, salary‑history questions and education screening all vary by state. For a staffing agency they follow the state of the assignment, not the state the office is in — so the same recruiter, on the same desk, in the same week, is working to two different rulebooks the moment they place into two states.

We could ship fifty speculative starter sets. We would be shipping fifty things nobody had validated, that go stale the first time a legislature sits, and that would be wrong with the confidence of something built in. So we do not. What we ship is the federal layer and the sector layer — the parts that are genuinely uniform — and then the state-specific requirements go where they actually belong: on the client.

Requirements live per client

Each client carries its own list of required documents. A hospital system in Ohio and one in Nevada are two clients with two lists, and a candidate is checked against the list of the client they are being submitted to.

You write the document types

Create it, name it, mark it mandatory or not, say whether it expires, say whether that expiry may raise a task, and set how often it must be re-checked. Adding a state-specific requirement takes a minute and no involvement from us.

Nothing is hidden per desk

Apply the healthcare set and the driving set to the same organization and both are live. A desk covering two sectors is normal, and nothing is scoped away from anybody who needs to see it.

The limitation worth stating plainly: requirements attach to a client, not to a state as such. If you run one national client that hires into twelve states with twelve different licensure rules, today that is twelve client records or twelve document types, not one client with a state dimension. Per-jurisdiction requirements on a single client are on the roadmap. If that is your shape, tell us — it moves up.

THE PRACTICAL POINT

Three things that catch US desks out.

Monthly is not annual

Exclusion screening runs monthly and again before each new assignment. A system that files it next to a two-year certificate will remind somebody in twenty-three months' time, and every placement in between is exposed.

The number is not the credential

One reference-number field, and a state, an endorsement or a clearance level has nowhere to live — so it ends up in a note nobody queries at 4pm on a Friday.

Nobody notices in a busy week

Compliance tracking that depends on somebody remembering to look is accurate right up until the fortnight when it matters. Anything falling due inside thirty days becomes a task on somebody's list automatically, because the check has to raise the work itself.

HOW ATS ENGINE HANDLES IT

Set your country once. The rest follows.

Choose United States at signup or in Settings, and the compliance starter sets, date formats and terminology follow it. Apply the set for your sector in a click, change whatever does not fit, and add whatever your clients ask for that no starter set could sensibly guess at.

Consent to share a candidate's file is recorded, can be withdrawn, and is checked at the moment they are submitted. Anything falling due inside thirty days raises a task. Each client carries its own required-document list, and any client without one follows your standard set.

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This page is a working reference, not legal advice. Federal rules change, agencies rename their forms, state law moves constantly, and the requirements for any given placement depend on the client, the role, the setting and the state of the assignment. Always check the current position with the issuing body or your own employment counsel. If you spot something here that has moved on, tell us at sales@ats-engine.com and we will correct it.