Which Software Background Check Automations Can Improve Quality of Hire?

Background checks are a powerful tool for making more informed hiring decisions, but inefficient processes may lead to candidate churn before you have the opportunity to extend a job offer.

A recent Checkr survey found that 82% of software employers agree that optimizing the background check process for accuracy and efficiency is essential to providing a positive candidate experience during the recruiting and hiring process. In turn, improvements to your hiring process can help you keep in-demand candidates engaged in your recruitment process.

In this article, we’ll explore how programmatic, automated adjudication actions can help you speed up your background check process—without sacrificing quality.

Our survey found that elevating the quality of hire was the top recruitment goal for software employers, followed by speeding up the hiring process and minimizing employee turnover.

Surveyed employers are largely satisfied with how their background check program helps them accomplish these goals:

Strategic employers know that optimizing the adjudication process presents can have the highest impact on your screening turnaround time and compliance management.

Our survey found that 41% of software employers have a fully manual background check adjudication process, compared to only 27% of survey respondents across all industries. Another 33% of software employers have a partially automated adjudication process, while 26% have what they consider to be a fully automated process in place.

An inefficient adjudication process can put you at risk of losing candidates to faster teams. It’s no surprise that the ease of reviewing and adjudicating results was ranked as the area that needs the most improvement in the background check process by survey respondents.

Further, 27% of software employers said that automating report classification and filtering would have the most significant impact on their background check efficiency.

Automated adjudication tools from modern background check providers streamline the background check process by allowing you to create custom rulesets and filters that automatically surface only records you want your team to review.

Automated workflows that clearly indicate whether a candidate’s report is clear or needs review can help you reduce adjudication turnaround times. This increased efficiency can be the difference between securing your top-choice candidate and losing them to a competitor.

Automated adjudication actions standardize how background checks are evaluated, mitigating biases that can creep into manual review and helping to ensure that every candidate is assessed against the same benchmarks. This can result in a fairer process that increases the likelihood of finding the best-fit talent for your team.

By surfacing only relevant charges and helping to reduce bias, programmatic adjudication can help you expand your talent pool with qualified candidates who may have otherwise been overlooked. For example, 79% of large software employers who use Checkr's Assess tool have automatically unblocked a candidate during the adjudication process.

Select a software background check provider that enables you to make conclusive eligibility assessments for each position by incorporating your own internal criteria. By establishing standards that align with your compliance and policy needs, you gain access to a tool that can—in a matter of seconds—automatically:

Adjudicators should be able to clearly see which candidates have been deemed eligible or flagged for further review, facilitating swift and uniform decision-making and streamlining the adverse action process. These eligibility assessments, based on your team's background check criteria, are available for human evaluation, assisting in compliance adherence and while drastically speeding up adjudication—especially when hiring at scale.

Most software industry survey respondents (82%) agree that optimizing the background check process for accuracy and efficiency is essential to providing a positive candidate experience. In turn, a timely, positive experience can help you keep in-demand talent engaged in your recruiting process so you can maintain a high quality of hire.

Checkr helps you build an efficient background check process so you can identify and engage the caliber of talent your team needs to reach your organizational goals. Get in touch today to learn more.

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About the author

Jen Dewar writes about HR technology with a focus on educational content for HR, talent acquisition, and DEIB professionals. She is passionate about diversity and inclusion, lifelong learning and development, and treating people like people throughout the candidate and employee experiences.