Background screening is an asset employers use to decrease the risk of a bad hire and improve their workforce. HR professionals should always be measuring and reviewing their screening process. Is it efficient? Does it return complete, accurate information? Is it cost-effective?
One of the most influential components of a background check is an employment verification.
What Is an Employment Verification?
An employment verification confirms the accuracy of a candidate’s employment history and related details. It may confirm dates of employment, positions held, past employment experiences, duration of employment, job responsibilities, and whether the person is eligible for re-hire.
Employment verifications, typically completed by a third-party vendor, help employers ensure that candidates possess the qualifications and experience they claim. The process helps employers mitigate the risk of hiring individuals who may misrepresent their work history.
Employment verifications have evolved from what they were just a few years back.
The Old Way of Verifying Employment
Employers that wanted to verify a job applicant’s employment history would either employ a background screening company to physically call each employer or pay them to check the employment status through third-party verifiers.
This manual-heavy process presented several cumbersome problems:
- It took several days. Requiring contact with a previous employer put investigators at their mercy to respond. Reaching them could take several days, which could hold up the hiring process.
- It was often incomplete. Employers may be unreachable or out of business. In addition, job applicants could omit jobs where they were fired.
- It opened up the opportunity for fraud. Unfortunately, applicants often misrepresent themselves. A recent study by Resume Lab reported that 37% of employees lied about the length of time they were employed and 24% made up an entire position! Job seekers could report they worked for a company and give phone numbers and emails that connected to friends or family who would give investigators a false verification.
- It was not cost-effective. Most of the time, screening vendors charged for each separate verification. If the applicant had held several jobs, verifying them all could get expensive.
The way employment verifications have always been managed has posed significant issues. Manual processes increase costs and hiring time. Plus, they may be missing crucial details.
The New (Data-Driven) Way of Verifying Employment
As with many business processes, bringing them up to date is a simple feat with technology. Verifying job applicant employment is no different. How? Here are several ways.
- Use mobile-friendly data entry. Giving candidates a way to enter information straight from their smart devices can cut the time to gather the information dramatically.
- Tap into the best databases. In the past, most employment verifications involved calling, faxing, or emailing the employer and asking for information. Even automated databases may contain erroneous or incomplete data that left holes in employment verifications. Now, as with Data Facts’ new Employment Pro platform, screeners can pull data from high-level databases like the IRS. Using high-quality platforms to gather data minimizes the chances of missing information the candidate left off the applications.
- Automate repetitive tasks. Being required to enter information in several places is time-consuming and can cause data errors. With technology, data integrity is better protected by automating entry and using uniform information in all the required places.
Employers can enjoy some powerful benefits by transforming the old way of conducting an employment verification search.
- Cost-efficiency. The manual labor involved in making calls, leaving messages, sending emails, and following up multiple times drive up the cost. Technology-driven employment verification processes significantly reduce the costs associated with more manual traditional methods.
- Streamlined pricing. In addition to reducing the manual part of verifying employment, data-driven searches return every place of employment found within a set time (usually 10 years). This, compared to the traditional setup that charges separately for every place of employment, makes the total pricing more transparent and budget-able.
- Fewer errors. Automation minimizes the likelihood of human errors and inaccuracies. Using data obtained directly from the IRS can help employers create standardized processes that increase the overall accuracy of the information used in making hiring decisions.
- More complete information. By accessing a wider range of platforms with high-quality data, background screening vendors can provide employers with a fuller picture of the job applicant’s work history with no gaps in the employment history. For example, verifying employment using the IRS database may return 1099 information that wouldn’t be available any other way.
- Faster return (and quicker hiring). Verifying information through phone calls and emails can take a few days or even longer. It may also be impossible to reach the contact person. During this time, the employer is in a holding pattern, unable to hire the applicant without the completed background check. With data-driven technological processes, data is delivered in minutes or hours instead of days. These time-savings can be crucial in onboarding the best talent quickly.
- Greater scalability. As an organization grows, its hiring needs typically do, too. By using technology to retrieve data, it’s easier to handle a larger volume of requests without proportional increases in labor costs.
Improve HR Efficiency by Modernizing Your Employment Verification Process
Continuously improving how an organization screens its potential employees elevates the entire process. Embracing data-driven technology offers a broader array of data sources, faster processing, a more complete candidate picture, and significant cost savings. The result? Better informed, faster hiring decisions, a more efficient screening process, and a healthier budget.
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If you're not yet a Data Facts client- Learn more about what Employment Pro can do for your business and sign up for a customized demo here: Employment Pro
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