3 Things You Thought You Knew About Outsourcing Employment Verifications

Your consumer reporting agency (CRA) has offered employment verification services for years, but the demand has never been like this. Each new day brings a new batch of orders, and as the verification requests pile up, your backlogs grow deeper and deeper — and your end-users grow more and more irritated.

Outsourcing verifications is a promising strategy for relieving the pressure.

As discussed in our recent ebook, by outsourcing employment verification orders to a third-party background screening data provider, CRAs like yours can make the most - as in revenue and profit - of today’s unprecedented labor market.

But you might be worried about losing control, which is natural — especially when there’s so much money on the line. The good news is that the three most common concerns about outsourcing stem from fundamental misunderstandings - things you thought you knew - about the value a best-in-class employment verifications data provider can offer.

Let’s dispel those myths right now by reviewing how people, process and technology work together to make outsourcing safe, scalable and profitable. (Read the ebook for a deeper dive into each of these issues.)

Myth #1: An Outsourced Vendor Can’t Handle My Volume

The nationwide labor shortage (also known as “The Great Resignation”) has not left CRAs untouched. Good people are hard to find and harder than ever to keep. To make matters worse, CRAs report that it can take as many as six weeks of training to get an inexperienced employment verifications specialist up to full production.

If your business is struggling to scale, wouldn’t an outsourced verifications provider be in the same boat? Perhaps some are, but here’s what you need to know before you outsource...

The truth: For starters, a top background screening data provider such as InformData is starting from a much higher staffing level than your CRA. At InformData, we started building up our verifications team as soon as we saw the incoming wave of demand. We’re currently at 500 high-quality, fully trained professionals! How’d we do it? 

Our proprietary, optimized training program (built using models pioneered by Apple, Zappos, and Toyota and backed with our own heuristics and state-of-the-art call center technology) gets new hires up to speed in less than a week (that’s 600% faster than the industry average), allowing us to scale up on demand to accept any volume level.

Myth #2: My Customization Needs Are Too Complex for Outsourcing

Every end-user has different requirements dictating call frequency, number of calls, when to leave a message, and so on. How could an outsourced provider — which might handle hundreds of clients — possibly cater to your customers’ individual customization needs?

The truth: At a leading background screening data provider like InformData, the calling process is heavily automated using cloud-based artificial intelligence to dynamically optimize our call centers. Calls are placed to the right people at the right time and routed to specialists who read from pre-written and tested scripts. Drop-down menus and other error-proofing tools help maintain consistency and efficiency.

Building off this streamlined base, even the most specialized customization requests are simply a matter of configuring our system to administer your rules (in a process that takes no more than three days). From our callers’ perspectives, one call is the same as the next, but your custom rules are followed to the letter.

Myth #3: I Can’t Trust a Third-Party Vendor With My Employment Verifications

Ultimately, your company is the one your end-users will blame for unacceptable turnaround times, inaccurate background screening reports, or lack of customization. How can you be sure an outsourced data provider will value your customers’ satisfaction as highly as you do?

The truth: As with anything in business, there are reliable outsourced employment verification providers and less trustworthy ones. To find a reliable partner, look for one that is in the business of doing verifications and stay away from vendors who just decided to start doing verifications because the market is hot.

We encourage you to research potential vendors’ credentials and history before settling on one. And once you do choose a vendor, if you are still uncertain, offer them a trial run, perhaps first by giving them your overflow verification orders, or the manual verifications that consume all your staff’s time.

At InformData, each member of our verifications leadership team has over a decade of experience in the industry, experience that forms the basis for our processes and efficiencies.

With 1.2 million verifications processed annually, and an 89% successful completion rate, our people, process and technology, have developed a reputation for quality, speed, and innovation that you can trust with your volume and complexity.

To learn more about how we can help your CRA emerge from the backlogs and generate more revenue from employment verifications, read our free ebook, “The Ultimate Guide to Turning Verification Challenges Into Opportunities for CRAs.”