Join America Back to Work, a weekly podcast, video, and blog series that covers timely and relevant topics affecting the labor market and workforce with industry experts. The series includes recruiting, hiring, retention, employee satisfaction, customer service, background screenings, and more.
From the Founders: The Road to S2Verify
In this week’s episode of America Back to Work, S2Verify co-founder, chief strategy officer, and former secret service agent Arnette Heintze, sat down with fellow co-founders Bill Whitford and Jim Zimbardi, to talk about the history of S2Verify, why they founded the business, and how the industry has changed since they opened their doors in 2009.
CEO Bill Whitford is widely recognized across the U.S. and global employment industry as a visionary and entrepreneurial pioneer. Before S2Verify, Whitford was a senior leader at background screening giant ChoicePoint, which supported more than half of the Fortune 500 companies.
President and chief compliance officer, Jim Zimbardi, brings three decades of experience in information technology, public records access, data management and analytics, data security, and compliance to S2Verify. Before joining the S2Verify leadership team, he held senior-level positions in two of the industry’s largest data and information services companies: ChoicePoint and Equifax.
In the episode, the S2Verify founders walk through their collective 20 years of experience in the human resources field and 25+ years of experience in corporate security and law enforcement (including the development of security strategies for U.S. presidents and other world leaders), outlining their personal resumes and the points at which their careers intersected.
Included in that tour through their collective history is a story from 2002 in which Zimbardi—during his time at industry leader ChoicePoint—was asked to orchestrate one of the largest (and most sensitive) background screening projects ever undertaken: the screening of 125,000+ TSA workers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
ChoicePoint completed the screenings in just four months. Ironically, this resulted in Zimbardi testifying before Congress after the U.S. Office of Personnel Management claimed that the work of ChoicePoint on the project was fraudulent.
Hear more stories like this, including an inspiring story about how Heintze first got interested in joining the Secret Service (hint: it involves Walter Kronkite and the Encyclopedia Britannica) Click here to listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.