First Advantage, a company of Symphony Technology Group and the world’s largest background screening firm, and Fama, a big data software company that offers social media screening, today announced a global, strategic partnership designed to provide Fortune 2000 companies software solutions that may help limit the incidence of mis-hiring and re-hiring across all position levels. The announcement was made in Atlanta today at Collaborate 2016, First Advantage’s inaugural user conference.

While First Advantage offers expertise in providing legally compliant risk management solutions to multinational corporations, Fama’s social media screening solution can assist hiring managers in gathering and making sense of vast and unstructured public data-sets.

“Criminal background checks are the backbone of the candidate screening process,” said Ben Mones, Fama’s CEO. “But we’ve seen strong demand from Fortune 500 companies for new software tools to help fill in the gaps of information on a person. Data shows us that social media and web analysis, done the right way, can figure heavily in helping businesses hire the right people.”

If the Fama solution is purchased separately from Fama and deployed alongside the First Advantage background screening platform, talent managers will soon be able to deploy a variety of assessments and screenings with a single click in their applicant tracking systems.

“Both First Advantage and Fama have been pioneering – in their own, legally compliant manners – the science of people analytics. The synergies seemed obvious, and can ultimately offer the industry some brand new and really innovative possibilities,” said Joe Jaeger, First Advantage chief revenue officer. “We’re excited to be chartering this new territory together.”