A leading professional services firm with a global reach, offering business transformation services to Fortune 500 clients. They currently employ over 125,000 people to provide services to clients in over 30 countries worldwide.
HR is full of necessary evils and near the top of that list is running employee background checks.
For those in HR, this part of the job can often feel endless, repetitive and uninspiring. There’s little room for creativity or strategic input when checking the validity of hundreds of ID documents.
For the organization though, this process is extremely crucial, and when not managed efficiently, is a big drain on resources, time and money.
For this customer, the situation had reached a breaking point.
They had a dedicated employee background check team managing over 10,000 active cases each month, all while relying on complex Excel spreadsheets — a method that was proving to be unsustainable.
Plus, the task of manually collecting data and documents from such a large number of candidates was overwhelmingly difficult.
On top of that, coordinating with different vendors led to frequent miscommunications and errors, compounding the inefficiencies.
Some of the core issues they shared with us included:
Getting accurate data was delaying employee background checks.
People very often ended up uploading wrong, incomplete or poor-quality files which the team had to manually review. Imagine doing this for thousands of new hires each month!
And each region, department and job level have different data and document requirements.
Communicating all these specific requirements to each individual new hire made the process even slower, becoming a significant bottleneck in the onboarding process.
Multiple background check vendors across multiple locations and tens of thousands of cases every month further increased the complexity of standardization and scale.
Assigning the right case to the right vendor and then following up with them frequently to ensure that the checks were completed within the agreed timeframe was leading to a lot of delays and oversight.
Sharing sensitive personal documents with external vendors through unsecure channels, involving multiple disjointed systems is fraught with risk. The organization needed to protect itself from from the possibility of a data breach.
The team had come to realize that the complexity of their employee background checks process was bringing them very close to a situation that could spiral out of control if not fixed as soon as possible.
It was, at this point, that Tydy had its first conversation with the IT and HR team of the company.
“The IT team at the professional services organization shared an aspirational background check workflow they wished to have. They were hoping to automate as many parts of it as possible to speed up and gain better control over the employee background check process.”
Amrithnath Vijayakumar, R&D Engineer - Tydy
Tydy had one goal: to make employee background checks easier for the team and faster for the company.
Keeping this in mind, we developed a background check module with advanced functionalities like:
One of the first things that needed to be eliminated was the silos that different systems were operating in.
Tydy integrated its background check module with the company's existing systems including the ATS and HRMS.
This helps gather and unify the information required for background verification automagically!
And once the check is complete, Tydy sends the relevant information to their HRMS and other systems - with zero manual intervention.
The team doesn’t have to pick up the phone or drop an email manually to any vendors anymore!
Through a built-in custom logic, Tydy auto-assigns verifications to the appropriate vendor.
In response, the vendors receive a notification on their Tydy interface about the new cases assigned to them.
In instances where automatic logic doesn't apply for whatever reasons, adjustments can be made easily by the HR team.
Vendors use Tydy to then carry out the verification process and share their reports.
If they find any information missing, they can directly prompt the candidates via Tydy to upload missing or insufficient documents, eliminating the communication back and forth between the vendor, HR and the candidate.
The team no longer sends out reminder emails or makes frantic calls to the candidate or vendor anymore.
Tydy ensures candidates receive reminders and notifications at regular intervals to expedite document sharing.
The same goes for the employee background check vendors as well.
The organization has cases where new hires need to join immediately even before their background checks are complete.
For positions that allow it, Tydy enables onboarding to proceed before the completion of background checks with just a click of a button.
Once completed, vendors can directly upload the reports to Tydy.
If a report is clear (marked 'green'), the HR team begins onboarding the candidate directly within Tydy, with reports also auto-forwarded to the HRMS.
For reports that raise concerns, the designated contact in HR reviews discrepancies to 'accept' or 'reject’ the candidate.
Higher-level approvals from senior HR leaders can also be sought directly through the platform.
Rejected candidates are automatically removed from all systems.
Approval PDFs are also simultaneously generated and dispatched to file management systems for record-keeping.
To date, the company has completed 80,000+ employee background checks using Tydy.
The time taken to complete the compliance process has been reduced from seven days to just about 24 hours.
Additionally, the company is now also able to evaluate the turnaround time of each background check vendor. This gives them visibility in terms of the amount of time each vendor takes but also allows them to make smarter allocation decisions based on urgency.
“An automated workflow for employee background checks helps HR teams save a lot of time. They can instead focus all that effort and the resources into other areas that require more strategic thinking.”
Amrithnath Vijaykumar, R&D Engineer - Tydy
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