Episode 72: Vivek Khanna on Building Neeyamo Into a Global Screening Powerhouse & Why the Cost of Saying No Is Always Too High

Send us Fan MailI have known Vivek Khanna for years. I see him at every PBSA conference, and I always wondered how someone becomes the person who figured out international background screening before most of the industry even knew it needed figuring out. This conversation gave me the full picture, and it was even more interesting than I expected.Who is Vivek KhannaVivek Khanna is the co-founder of Neeyamo, a global HR services company covering background screening in over 200 countries with in-house operations in more than 80 of them. He also founded ScreenXchange, a technology platform built for background screening companies outside the US that embeds an AI agent called Agent Sam for verification workflows. Vivek served as chair of the PBSA Global Advisory Council and helped initiate the international accreditation standards that now cover companies worldwide.Vivek started as a chartered accountant in India, ran his family's manufacturing business, caught the internet bug in 1998, landed in the US just as the dot-com bubble burst, and stumbled into background screening through a LexisNexis contract that showed him a broken global process and a massive opportunity. He built Neeyamo into one of the most recognized names in international screening, initiated the PBSA international accreditation standards, and somewhere along the way also became a music producer releasing Hindi ghazal albums on Spotify using AI.Pro Conversation You Don't Want to Miss!How Vivek turned international background screening from a pass-through cost CRAs barely broke even on into a high-margin revenue line, sometimes at a ratio of fifteen dollars cost to seventy-five dollars billedThe core value that drives everything at Neeyamo: customer centricity, and why the cost of saying no to a customer is always higher than the cost of saying yesHis take on the organizational triangle turning into a diamond, and why the future belongs to people who adopt AI tools and move up to the middle management layer rather than fight the shiftHow Vivek helped kick off the PBSA international accreditation standards, a process that took five years and now covers companies across the globeThe fun fact that genuinely surprised me: in the last two months, using AI tools, he wrote Hindi ghazal poetry, converted it into fully produced songs with music, and released three albums on Apple Music and Spotify under the name Bedar LakhnawiSubscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Thanks to our sponsor, PreemploymentDirectory.com, publisher of Background Buzz and numerous other resources. And a special thanks to W. Barry Nixon.Connect with US:Les Rosen- https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesterrosen/Subscribe to our YouTube Channel- https://www.youtube.com/@BehindtheSCreens200