How Your Background Check Can Power Your HR Transformation

Even if companies invest in creating a strong “employer brand” through compelling ads and other tactics, things can fall apart once new talent actually connects with the organization.

For most candidates, a successful hiring process ends with a formal offer of employment. Traditionally, however, employers need to let their strongest contenders know they will be subject to a background check. This introduces a lot of potential negatives into an otherwise positive experience: 

Mystery: Legacy background vendors don’t always partner effectively with their customers to help candidates what the background check involves, how long it will take and how the results will inform the final decision. This creates uncertainty and jeopardizes any trust the employer might have established with a potential new hire up to that point. 

Undue Effort: Background check processes that are reliant on manual, paper-based processes can frustrate potential hires, who might reasonably wonder whether other parts of the organization are similarly inefficient. 

Extra Time: When background checks are held up because of slow processes or an inability to easily sift through the results to make the right hiring decision, candidates may opt for another offer, and share their disappointment with others who might have been prospective recruits. 

Some of these challenges overlap with the struggles of CHROs and their teams, too. The big risk is conflating one challenge with another. According to a recent employer survey by staffing firm Adecco USA, for instance, 52 percent of firms would like to speed up the hiring process. 16% also said they were flexible on the idea of stopping background checks. While the latter isn’t a high number, it may reflect that employers associate background checks as an impediment to their HR team, rather than a process that benefits the entire organization. 

This is why CHROs have an opportunity to learn more about how more advanced background check technologies can accelerate hiring processes and, ultimately, contribute to successful HR transformation. 

Some of the goals you can consider as you evaluate background check technologies as part of such initiatives include: 

Candidate Experiences That Become Employee Experiences: Although not everyone who applies for a job gets hired, anyone who does effectively starts their relationship with the company the moment they begin the process. 

A background check platform that leaves them informed, empowered, and mirrors the rest of the organization’s brand is as important as the onboarding new hires will experience later. 

Risk Mitigation And A Focus On High-Value Work: Those in HR and others involved in hiring processes need to ensure they are compliant with laws and industry regulations. 

The right background check applications will automate routine tasks, identify potential errors before they happen and leave the team better able to focus on other aspects of HR transformation that make better use of their time and talents. 

CHROs may not be experts in technologies such as cloud computing or artificial intelligence (AI) but they will appreciate how these handle many transactions at once and provide greater access to features that will help their organizations reduce the burden of compliance.

Long-Term IT Investments That Extend And Scale: HR transformation might have begun with the automation of things like performance reviews or scanning resumes. Extending the benefits of automation to background checks becomes headache-inducing when it ties up developer resources that could otherwise devoted to customer-facing projects. 

This is why it’s important for CHROs to carefully consider tools that will let them order, review, and assess background check reports without leaving their existing HCM or ATS platforms. They should also be investing in background check technologies that can self-configure as business needs change and provide service and support to address unexpected questions or problems. 

CHROs can reach their goals faster by integrating an AI-driven background check.

Hiring the right candidates becomes more fluid. 

HR becomes more aligned with IT. 

The HR department becomes more “future-proofed,” and ready to adapt when new objectives are established and technology shifts again.

The most successful CHROs know that HR transformation is not an end in itself but a way of ensuring their teams are in the best possible position to help their organizations achieve their objectives. Background checks should play a key role in making that happen.