Making Verifications Easy For Recruiters: Tools & Strategies

Employment verifications — are they slowing down your hiring?

Many background check reports include an employment verification. These verifications confirm a candidate has held job positions they have claimed on a resume or a job application. Verifying employment for candidates who have held positions are larger companies is relatively easy.

However, if your applicant has worked for smaller firms or staffing agencies, then verifications can take longer and delay the hiring process. Your background check vendor should be able to complete these checks without burdening your recruiters.

This article advises you how to diagnose if your background check provider is going the extra mile to help your recruiters hire faster.

Recruiters Should Not Have To Perform Employment Verifications

Does the following scenario ever happen to your recruiters?

• Your recruiter is waiting on one last employment verification for a background check report to clear. The background check company has a cryptic “verification in progress” status message and your account manager has no idea what is taking so long.
• Three to five days later the background check firm reports they are unable-to-verify the employment record. Your recruiter then picks up the phone and calls the candidate. The candidate provides the prior supervisor’s phone number.
• The recruiter then calls the supervisor, who immediately verifies the employment and even sends a scan of an employment record. Your recruiter is rightly asking why the background check company could not have made that happen as quickly versus the hiring process being delayed!

Unfortunately, this is a far too common occurrence for many recruiters. This is happening because most background check companies, especially large ones, are doing everything they can to optimize their profit margins on verifications at your recruiters’ expense.

Evaluating A Background Check Company’s Verifications Performance

When an employment verification request is received by a background check company, it falls into one of two types.

The first are those records that can be verified by a 3rd party service like Equifax’s The Work Number. Those are large databases that typically cover employment records for large companies.

The second are those records that require a verifier to complete the verification by reaching out to the prior employer. And if the prior employer is out of business, the verifier may need to work with a candidate to gather supplemental information like a W2 to complete the record.

Big background check companies hate these types of verifications because of the high cost of labor involved in completing these verifications. So, the big background check company will direct the verifier to put in the minimal effort over three days and, if the verification can’t be done, they will mark it “unable-to-verify” and move on.

The unable-to-verify rate for large background check companies can often be a staggering 20% to 25% of verifications (including the automated ones that are easy).

What happens next? The verification is pushed back to your recruiter who tries to do the work themselves.

Pick A Background Check Vendor That Likes Verifications

Some background check companies (like ScoutLogic) actually like doing verifications. Tackling challenging verifications so recruiters can focus on finding great talent is our mission, so the last thing we want is recruiters having to chase down W2s.

To determine if your background check company wants to do the tough verifications, here are three questions to ask them and the correct answers!

What is your unable-to-verify rate?

The answer should be under 10%. Unfortunately, many firms have rates that are higher than 15%, which means the work will just fall back on your recruiters. To keep this rate low, a great background check verifier is going to go the extra mile with more attempts and close collaboration with candidates to keep that rate as low as possible.

What happens if an employer is out of business?

At this point, assuming you have given permission, a background check company verifier should reach out to the candidate to help find additional means for verifying the record. This most often includes gathering additional documentation such as an old pay stub or a W2 that can be uploaded into a background check report.
How do you measure success?
This question tells you what the background check company really cares about. If the answer is, how many checks are completed in a day…you are going to have a lot of employment records fall back on your recruiters.

Big background check company heads of operations love to point to how many records their teams closed out, but if 25% of them fall back on recruiters…that is making hiring harder and slower.

What your background check company should care about is the number of attempts and, most importantly once again, their unable-to-verify rate.

Conclusion

ScoutLogic loves tough employment verifications. Our team goes the extra mile to complete challenging verifications by working closely with candidates and former employees to get the job done. Our team at ScoutLogic provides a full suite of background checks:

• Employment background checks
• Education verification
• Employment verification
• Reference checking
  Drug testing
• Criminal background investigations

If your business could benefit from an online background check service, contact ScoutLogic today for a free assessment of your current program.

ScoutLogic is not a law firm and nothing in this article should be construed as legal advice. Always check with a qualified attorney before making any changes to your program

David Garcia

David Garcia is the co-founder and CEO of ScoutLogic. David is also a senior operating advisor for Norwest Venture Partners. David is a member of the boards of ScoutLogic, YipitData, and Supplier.io and was formerly on the boards of Infutor and Avetta. He has over 25 years of B2B commercial leadership experience in data & analytics companies.