“For hiring managers, a background check – or the screening of an applicant’s job history, vehicle records, criminal records, and more – often represent a final logistical hurdle in the application and onboarding process. After going through a potentially long application process, the background check is often a simple process of verifying that prospective hires are who they said they are, and that they are ready to do the job at hand.
For shorter application processes, the background check can do even more work; without as many touch points along the way, it offers an opportunity to gather basic information about your applicants and verify their personal narratives, giving the hiring team the go-ahead to trust the information that has been provided and make educated decisions about the best possible hires.
While background checks offer a number of benefits to organizations, they need to be done correctly. Inaccurate or unfair employment background checks lead to a culture of surveillance and, at worst, legal action against your organization. That’s why it’s so important to work with experts who can ensure that your screening process not only helps you make the best hires, but also keeps your company compliant.
3 Ways to Improve Your Hiring Process with Background Check Technology
Onboard faster
Some background checks can take as long as two weeks to go through. In today’s climate, when there are more job applicants than openings, a slow hiring process can mean losing your candidates to your competitors. When background checks involve manual data input, or depend on your prospective hires taking a call from an unknown number in order to formally agree to the process, you slow the process down. When technology leverages the communication types that your applicants actually use – for example, text messaging – you speed up the process and make it less of a strain on all involved.
Save your hiring managers time
While some background check services require your hiring managers to manually load information, this does not need to be the case. But when technology can tailor an integration between screenings and your other HR systems, such as ATS/HRIS/ERP, you minimize the amount of time that your hiring managers take overseeing the process. Background checks should be automated, not just as a service but also as software.
Keep Personal Data Secure
Each third-party resource involved in a background check decreases the security of your employees’ personal data. With a software solution dedicated to handling everything screening related at once, you can keep data secure and protected from data breaches and abusive bots. This is critical to keep your liability limited, but it does even more work: by showing your prospective applicants the care with which you treat their personal information, you use background screenings as an opportunity to build a culture of trust.
Background screening is a useful check to ensure that both sides of a hiring process abide by expectations of honesty and integrity. While most employers consider it a one-time check mark, strategic hiring managers see the value in ongoing monitoring: rather than periodically running your employees through a background screening to catch what you may have missed, consistent monitoring finds irregularities before they become issues. By promoting a consistent approach to screenings, companies find that they create a culture of consistent transparency and trust.”
March 2023, E. Bogin