The hiring process is becoming increasingly complex. Between managing compliance paperwork, delivering authorizations and generating disclosures, and keeping track of payments to providers, it can be easy for human error to occur at any step along the way.
Automated background checks can help you eliminate these headaches and make your hiring process faster and more efficient. Here are some of the key benefits automated background checks offer:
Speed
In an era of rampant identity theft, employers must conduct thorough background checks to avoid hiring imposters. In addition to verifying an applicant’s identity, a background check will also look for any criminal history or poor credit scores.
When automating this process, businesses can employ AI technology provided by industries like Sterling Check to quicken the search and analyze massive volumes of data. They can hire the best candidates for their organizations and make decisions about job applicants more quickly.
However, before automating the screening process, it’s important to consider some potential drawbacks. For instance, AI can be biased and may make employment decisions that aren’t fair to applicants.
For this reason, it’s important to partner with a company that can provide accurate and timely results. This will ensure that you get the most out of your background check and avoid any problems in the long run. It will also allow you to make better and safer hires for your business.
Accuracy
As more companies use criminal background checks as part of their hiring process, they also increase the data they collect. This means the possibility of errors is greater than ever, and just one mistake can have devastating consequences for a company.
As a result, many companies are turning to automation to help speed up and increase the accuracy of their background check processes. This includes companies specializing in criminal background checks and those doing more general screenings.
Automated criminal background screening technology works by “scraping” court websites to obtain conviction and sentencing information, pending cases, etc. It then compiles the results and formats them into whatever fields you require for reporting.
However, some automated background check companies make mistakes when analyzing this data, which can result in false negatives or positives. This can lead to discrimination against certain groups, such as people of color.
As a result, it’s important to ensure that the background check companies you work with have rigorous procedures to ensure maximum accuracy. This can help avoid the legal risk of relying on inaccurate or incomplete criminal background check reports to make adverse employment decisions, exposing your business to liability under federal and state statutes.
Scalability
Traditionally, background screening companies relied on human researchers to manually pull down criminal records and compile them into customer reports. This process can be lengthy and often involves multiple steps like visiting court websites, running searches, pulling down data, and formatting it.
Automated people-risk solutions can reduce research times and costs by delivering same-day results from jurisdictions nationwide. Depending on the type of search, automated tools can also search multiple counties, aliases, and name variations simultaneously for faster results and more manageable vendor costs.
Many gig economy companies use AI-powered background checks to make hiring quicker and more efficient. While these services can help speed up the hiring process, they can also create bias and privacy concerns.
Efficiency
As more companies invest in a comprehensive background check, they are looking for the most efficient way to perform it. Using AI is one-way companies can speed up the background screening process and achieve better results.
Aside from criminal records, automated background checks can verify information on education and other qualifications. This makes them more reliable than their manual counterparts, which often miss crucial data and information.
Similarly, these checks help verify that an applicant’s social media profiles are legitimate and not fake accounts. This helps employers hire people who will be safe and honest with their clients and employees.
In addition, these checks are a good way to ensure that the person you hire has no bad driving records or credit scores that could affect their ability to work safely.
Aside from these benefits, a comprehensive background check can help determine whether an applicant fits your company’s culture. In addition to checking criminal history, these checks may include a social media search and other digital screening.
Cost
Automated criminal background screening technology works by “scraping” court websites for conviction and sentencing information, pending cases, etc., compiling and formatting the data into whatever fields you require for reporting.
As automation reduces the manual work required to run criminal background checks, it can save companies time and money by retrieving same-day results from jurisdictions across the country. Depending on the search type, automated people-data solutions also allow companies to simultaneously research multiple counties, aliases, and name variances for a well-rounded risk assessment at a fraction of the cost.
The downside to using automation is that it may not address errors and mistakes on criminal records reports. For example, suppose a vendor’s automated search scraped only five years of felony convictions, and you ordered a search that covered seven. In that case, your company could risk legal liability if an applicant was hired because of this information gap.
