In an extremely competitive labor market, HR and recruiting teams have to focus on speeding time to apply and time to hire, especially for high-volume seasonal or hourly roles. Candidates aren’t waiting for a response from one company before applying to another and the competition for hourly talent is fierce as restaurant, service, and retail job openings are rising quickly.
The longer your hiring process takes, the higher the likelihood that your applicant may find work elsewhere. While it is critical to move quickly or lose candidates, it’s also necessary to run background checks on potential employees in order to maintain a safe work environment. This includes part-time, contract, and contingent workers – in short, anyone who works with your employees and customers. A background check is an extra step in your hiring process, but it is critical in order to reduce risk and liability.
How Can Recruiting Teams Hire Faster and Smarter?
A growing number of employers are starting background checks earlier in the hiring process, especially for high volume hiring where time to hire is vital. For example, a company may increase the number of background checks earlier in the process in order to increase the speed at which a candidate will begin work.
This practice decreases total time to hire and the likelihood that candidates continue their job search prior to their start date. And, this is easily manageable when you and your team work with a background screening partner, but this level of scalability is nearly impossible to accomplish internally.
When HR and recruiting teams conduct background checks in house, your internal team doesn’t just spend time verifying employment history and checking references. They also have to stay on top of both Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines for collecting, using, and disposing of background check information.
Laws vary by state too, so most companies require a dedicated team just to maintain the most basic compliance standards. This means that some of your staff members aren’t spending time on outreach; they’re doing the complicated legwork that makes up the due diligence process for background checks.
Working with a screening partner that not only understands your need to swiftly make offers to your candidates, but who stays on top of all federal and state compliance requirements that keep your company and employees safe, is key to streamlining your hiring process.
Just as integrations like automated applicant responses work with your ATS to keep candidates informed of where they stand in your hiring process and frees up your team to focus on reaching more candidates, integrating your background screening partner can have the same benefits. For example, as your team assesses applicants and moves them through your ATS for seasonal retail roles, Crimcheck integrates with your ATS and can concurrently begin background checks, which reduces your time to offer and onboarding time.
With speed sometimes comes the cost of quality, so make sure that your background screening partner has specific experience in providing thorough background checks in your industry and offers a mobile optimized platform that streamlines your processes as well as your candidate experience.
For example, hospitality candidates who will work directly with the public are going to require a broader background screening process than an e-commerce remote hire; but each has its own unique set of flags.
Remote hires aren’t exempt from background checks because they don’t work onsite; in fact, cybersecurity is a huge issue for online retailers and most other employers, so you’ll want to ensure that your candidate’s employment history and references are accurate, along with a criminal check that looks for specific charges related to cybersecurity.
When you hire at high-volume for a hybrid workforce, selecting a partner like Crimcheck which provides technology that streamlines your screening and compliance processes can be the secret ingredient that helps speed your time to hire, allowing you to extend offers to candidates before your competitors do. With Crimcheck, you can offer applicants a link to electronically sign their background check authorization on any mobile device, which saves you time in the background check order process and helps your team move candidates through your hiring process more quickly.
