Doesn’t it seem like the hiring process should be more streamlined by now? According to Glassdoor, it can take an average of 23.8 days to get an offer from a U.S.-based company. Some employers can extend that time up to 30 days.
A long, laborious hiring process isn’t good for employers or job candidates, so why is it still taking so long?
One of the main holdups in the hiring process is the background check. Ninety-four percent of employers do some form of background screening. Depending on the type of preemployment screening used, background checks can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 30 days to process.
There are many factors that extend the time it takes to complete a background check, from incomplete forms getting returned to disputed results. The background check industry is outdated and clearly in need of a reboot. A better system would be one that is not dependent on manual inputs that are vulnerable to data loss and human error.
Here are some other ways to improve the background check industry.
Set A New Stage
The background check platforms that are currently used by most employers are overly manual and outdated, relying too heavily on phone call verifications and e-mail correspondence to finish.
The top services in the industry spend a lot on advertising to get selected by HR departments, but they all use the same analog methods and pull from the same sources. The only difference is in the branding and in varying quality levels of user interface (UI)/user experience (UX). UX is important for both the employer and the jobseeker, but having a good interface is hardly innovative; it’s just common sense.
As this industry evolves, the next natural evolution is to leverage technologies and perform pre-verifications for anything from employment to education to criminal background.
Learn from Other Industries
How do companies like Netflix and Spotify distribute content to users? How does Tesla push software updates to its vehicles? The answer is by leveraging application programming interfaces (APIs) that have the ability to provide accurate results almost instantly. APIs that connect via Web applications to user-provided front-end data and connect that with back-end data to generate results are already a part of our daily lives.
While this technology is not new, it has not been properly applied to background screening, even though several Web apps doing it are probably running on your smartphone as you’re reading this.
Besides gaining a serious time advantage, making a shift to user-permissioned data would actually provide the person getting screened with more data privacy than the current system. It would give more transparency and ownership over who gets to see the data and for what purposes. One of the beautiful things about an API-based verification system is that the data collected does not have to be stored once the results are rendered.
Users are already comfortable interacting with data this way. It’s a win/win: Employers get the accuracy they require, and jobseekers get more privacy. Both groups benefit from quicker results.
The Future of Background Checks
Preemployment verification is going to look very different in the next 5 years (and hopefully even sooner than that). The world of work has already evolved, with more remote work, hybrid work, and overall job mobility than ever before. Everything is going digital, too.
With workers being moving targets who could interview and work from anywhere in the world, there’s never been more demand for accurate background checks. Potential employees don’t want to wait 30 days to find out if they’re going to get an offer or not. Top talent has the luxury of not having to wait around for an employer to get its act together; they’ll just accept a competitive offer from someone else.
Background screening is an important step in the hiring process and should not be overlooked. A company that fails to do due diligence before welcoming a new hire could find itself in an embarrassing and costly situation.
With the increasing globalization of the workforce, solutions are needed that can provide consistent results at scale, regardless of location, time zones, or cultural differences.
Innovation Has Opened All Industries Up To Disruption
To borrow the title of a book by futurist investor Peter Diamandis and author Steven Kotler, The Future Is Faster Than You Think. There is innovation and the convergence of technology happening across all major industries. It’s time the background check industry catches up.
David Alexander is the CTO of ZippedScript, a leading education verification company. an education verification company, and his passion is in transforming legacy industries to become more effective and user-friendly. He leads internal team development efforts while overseeing UX/UI, client onboarding, and compliance for the company’s platforms and has a wide range of experience developing proof-of-concept and early-stage technical solutions, with a focus on troubleshooting, staffing, privacy, and rollout. Previously, Alexander worked as a consultant with a number of publicly traded Canadian organizations. He is adept at communicating highly technical concepts and processes on a consumer level and managing the efficient workflow and processes of internal teams. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a BASc in mechanical engineering and an M.Eng in financial engineering and believes the best technology challenges the assumptions of how things have been done to arrive at new solutions that serve the needs of both the company and the end user.