Automated employee background checks: 5 ways to complete compliance at warp speed
If HR professionals around the globe were to cast an anonymous vote for the most boring parts of their jobs, employee background checks would be vying for a top spot.
And for those advocating the "just breathe and push through" approach, we beg to differ.
No, not because we think employee background checks are not important. Far from it – they’re crucial (a point we’ve already established in an earlier blog).
But because there exists a vastly superior method that is far more effective. One that will reduce your time to hire drastically.
And what’s that?
AUTOMATED employee background checks.
Now, let’s get to the real question: What parts of your employee background check can you put on autopilot?
Five things you can automate in employee background checks (to breeze through compliance)
Your time and energy are too precious to be lost on things that can actually be automated. Like…
1. The endless back-and-forth emails, SMSes and calls to candidates and employee background check vendors
It starts with emails, calls and SMSes to the candidate to get the right information and documents from them for employee background screening. Then sharing that with the background check vendor and following up a few times (if not more!). And if there’s a discrepancy in the documents, then going back to the candidate to get the right one.
If we were to do some quick math, you might be sending out at least 5-6 communications on average for the background check of one employee.
Now multiply that with all the new candidates that need to be onboarded in a month!
If you’ve ever wished someone else could take this over from you, the answer is yes, technology can.
At Tydy, we automate all the communication between HR, the candidate and the vendor. You can set up reminders, nudge the stakeholders through messages and emails, and even set up escalations, if needed, completely eliminating all that manual back-and-forth communication.
2. Manually resolving insufficiencies - so many of them!
A subset of the communication headache is resolving document insufficiencies. Wrong files here, missing data there, or the occasional low-quality upload can grow into a big mountain of insufficiencies to deal with.
In all the above cases, the vendor will reach out to you and then you have to reach out to the candidate, follow up with them, get the relevant data and then reshare it with the vendor.
That’s just a lot of (unnecessary) hassle.
Well, the good news is this can be automated too!
On Tydy the vendor can raise the insufficiency on the platform, sending a direct notification to the candidate who can then share the missing information - taking you out of the communication loop completely!
3. Missed opportunities, wasted resources and unbridged gaps
Do you know how each of your background check vendors are performing? Who has a faster turnaround time? Who is swifter with criminal checks? Or who lags in employer verifications?
Can you look at your background check data and identify any patterns in drop-offs and background check status? Do you know if data insufficiencies affect drop-off behavior?
This level of visibility and insights from analytics can speed up your employee background check.
But if, like this global enterprise, you’ve been managing all this on Excel sheets, finding this information is harder than finding a needle in a haystack. The worst part is, sometimes there is no needle to find!
Alternatively, a solution like Tydy can help you track and understand how each of your vendors is performing and learn from the trends that are not otherwise evident. This allows you to take the right actions to speed up background checks.
4. Struggling to customize screening for different roles and locations
Most organizations have different types of checks that need to be completed for employees based on their role, location and certain other parameters.
In the absence of automation, this needs to be done manually, slowing the process. Worse, if you’re using Excel sheets with rules, you don’t know when you run into errors or discrepancies until it is too late.
Automating employee background checks will let you set the right logic to allow this process to run on its own.
For example, you can set rules like: If an employee is from location A joining in role B, then the employee background check to be completed include X, Y and Z.
5. Disintegrated systems, data security threats, and more manual work
Technology is supposed to make your work easier and it definitely has!
But it has also introduced a new set of manual work to manage and a fresh set of data security concerns. Like, manually moving data between systems that operate in silos is additional work. Plus it poses a huge data security risk for the business.
For example, an Applicant Tracking System will have all the information about the candidate. Once this candidate is ready to undergo an employee background check, the data has to be manually downloaded from this system and uploaded into the vendor’s background check app.
Then, once the report is ready, it will have to be uploaded to the onboarding system, in the HRMS and any other document management tool the organization might have.
This process isn’t just time-consuming, it is also bad for data security since most of the data is probably being shared via unsecured channels - most often in the form of .csv files.
By choosing a tool that can integrate your entire HR tech stack, you don’t have to do the manual work of communicating between multiple systems while also ensuring your employee data is secure.
Employee background checks - Just automate it!
Before we sign off, how many hours or days is your team putting into manual employee background checks?
And how much is that costing your team and your company?
Weigh this cost against the cost of automating this process. We’re sure you’ll find your reasons to automate right there.
And if you are stepping on that automation pedal, don’t forget to check out Tydy.
Catch a glimpse of what Tydy can do to automate your employee background check right here or book a live demo to see the product in action.
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