3 Defining Characteristics of a Best-in-Class Third-Party Employment Verifications Provider.

In our previous ebook, Scale, Specialization and Profitability: A Business Perspective on Modern CRA Employment Verification Services, we covered the reasons that justify outsourcing some or all of your employment verifications work to a trusted third-party provider. If you’re convinced outsourcing can help your business, you now have a major decision to make:

Which outsourced resume verifications provider do you trust with your business?

One of the big misconceptions about outsourcing anything is that it’s a leap of faith. The main argument in favor of handling all your business in-house is that you retain complete control. You hire the people; you create the processes; you specify the technology and you determine the schedule.

Outsourcing, by definition, requires giving up at least some control and allowing another organization that may have different standards and ways of doing things to represent your company. But outsourcing should never be about blindly handing over your hard-earned reputation and customer goodwill to an unknown.

All this is to say, whether outsourcing employment verifications helps your CRA achieve its aims or holds you back is almost entirely dependent on your choice of partner.

In the following section, we’ll help you choose the right one.

Remember the “35-65” rule? At InformData, we know that roughly 35% of employment verification orders can be handled nearly instantaneously using automated tools such as The Work Number. The remaining 65% must be completed manually — which means phone calls, leaving messages, waiting for responses, calling back, and so on.

If you’re not ready to go all-in on outsourcing, we propose shuttling the 65% of your orders that can’t be completed automatically to a reliable third party. This strategy will prevent your internal team from getting bogged down in time-consuming manual research, allowing you to maintain an efficient, focused, process-driven team.

Alternately, you might consider dipping your toe into outsourcing by offloading your overflow orders to a third party. Keep your team running efficiently at capacity all the time and outsource the difficult-to-predict demand spikes that might otherwise bog you down. With a high-quality outsourced provider on your side, your company will be ready to efficiently handle whatever the market throws your way.

When choosing a partner to work with for employment verifications, a good rule of thumb (which applies to choosing any vendor) is that your provider should at least match the quality, timeliness, and precision you expect from your in-house team.

From your clients’ perspective, your outsourcing partner’s work should be indistinguishable from your own. If your clients do notice any differences, they should all be positive ones, such as a faster turnaround time and a lower UTV rate.

How can you be sure a third-party vendor will share your organization’s dedication to quality and speed? Here are three key characteristics to look for:

1. Transparency

When selecting an employment verifications service partner that is going to be an extension of your organization the first characteristic you want to check for is transparency. How are you going to know, before it’s too late, that this organization is being as responsive, as thorough and as customer oriented as your own CRA? Are they going to make you look good… even better than if you’d provided the same employment verifications yourself? It’s one thing to be promised good service. It’s a completely different matter to be able to measure it. Transparency lets you measure the service you’re getting.

Transparency is so important, you may want to check it before signing a service contract. Will your partner let you “test drive” their data? Provide a batch of verifications that will allow you to test the speed, depth of information, completion rates, etc. to see whether it meets your quality standards. Another way to test transparency is to review the kind or reports you will have access to and whether you can generate them yourself, whenever you want them. Apart from data and reporting another test of transparency is what happens when things don’t go according to plan?

Should issues arise, a transparent third-party employment verifications provider will let you know as soon as they know so that you can fill your client in on the problem, adjusting processes to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

For example, sometimes verifying a job applicant’s resume takes longer than it should due to errors on the resume itself, such as misspellings. A trustworthy employment verifications provider will keep you in the loop as they work through these errors. They may even offer to accelerate the process by contacting the applicant directly. You could drop some known defective records into your “test drive” and see how your prospective service provider responds.

2. A Scalable Operation

For you, as a CRA, working with a third-party employment verification provider solves the problem of scale. Specifically, it allows you to rapidly expand or contract your business in response to changes in the marketplace (such as those we all experienced in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic).

So, it stands to reason that your third-party provider should have also solved the scale problem. In other words, your partner should be ready at a moment’s notice to handle all the volume you send them without delay — and for less money than building and maintaining your in-house team through market ups and downs.

The crucial ingredients in a scalable verifications operation are people, process and technology. Sometimes we think of these as people, training and technology. These are each very expensive fixed costs, but the outsourcing specialist invests in each to deliver a highly efficient, effective, variable cost verification service.

Most CRAs try to avoid adding people - new staff members - at all costs, for two reasons. First, it can take six weeks or more of unprofitable expense (training on the process) to get a new researcher up to full production. Often this is because organizations rely heavily on institutional knowledge more than on training materials; when someone leaves the organization, their experience departs with them. Second, because once trained and onboarded, these staff and expenses remain even when the market for their service evaporates. You can’t snap your fingers and make effective researchers, and their expense, appear and disappear at will.

On the other hand, a best-in-class outsourced provider will have designed and analyzed their process and built years of institutional knowledge into their systems. They exploit the latest call center technology to deliver the relevant information to their team members precisely when they need it and use mutivariate analysis to learn the most efficient processes for each situation. Using these expensive technologies and techniques, an outsourcing specialist compresses a six-week onboarding process into three days, allowing their organization to modulate quickly to accommodate whatever volume their CRA clients require.

3. A Commitment to Innovation: Data Driven, Technology Geeks, and Process Obsessed

As a CRA, you only have access to the data generated by your own employment verification process among your limited pool of clients. Contrast this with the dozens or hundreds of CRAs the typical third-party provider works with, each CRA representing multiple employers. The result is a mountain of information perfectly suited to making the most efficient, accurate scalable verification service anywhere… and just waiting to be acted upon..

Top-tier employment verification providers don’t let all this data go to waste. Instead, they use it to optimize their processes and improve their technology, and by doing so, lower their turnaround time, decrease their UTV rate, and minimize their expenses.

The best third-party verification providers are in a constant state of research and development. They immerse themselves in the data, run experiments, and build on their findings, all in an unceasing quest to serve their CRA clients with more accurate results, faster.

What kind of insights are hidden in the data? Here are a few examples:

• What times of day get the most immediate results when calling sources?
• How many calls should you make during a particular time frame?
• What impact do different calling patterns have on UTV or turnaround time?
• Should you email sources before calling them?

InformData meets all three of the criteria described above. And we demonstrate them daily to earn our client’s trust.

We’re Transparent

When you hear outsource, you might be thinking one size fits all. True, some third-party verifiers force you to fit into their model to achieve efficiency that keeps costs down. That’s not the InformData way. Our methodology recognizes that your CRA fills a unique need in your market. Your brand is about how you provide your service and InformData’s service must always be a seamless extension of your service. Every engagement is built on a 57 point consultation. By the time we’re working together, we’ll know your business, and your customers, as well as you do. We process more verifications than anyone else in the industry, by a lot:Over 5,700 verifications per day. More than 1.5 million verifications this year. 89% successful completion rate65% completion within two attemptsAverage turnaround: 2 daysHere are two ways that we provide transparency that puts you in control of the verifications we conduct on your behalf:Test Drive your data. Evaluate our quality, our turnaround time, and the tools we offer to streamline the process. We invite our CRA clients to take a test drive before you make a decision Reports. Reports. Reports. Once you’ve selected InformData as your outsourced resume verification partner, you’ll use InformData to know more about your verifications than you probably know by doing them yourself:Real-time in-process queue, by customerAggregated performance statistics, by customerReal-time status on every verificationOverall Verification RateUnable to Verify RateFirst Call Attempt Success RateSuccess Rate per Call AttemptPercentage of Verifications Completed by Automated v. ManualOur goal as a partner is to help your business grow and help your brand shine using the best people, process and technology.

Your Volume Won’t Be a Problem

Unique among third-party employment verification providers, InformData has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in building state-of-the-art call centers. Our cloud-powered call centers use the same scheduling, automation and artificial intelligence that powers the most effective and efficient customer service organizations on the planet.Our specialists are never at a loss as to who to call or what to say. Advanced algorithms direct calls to the right people at the right time, eliminating guesswork and confusion and increasing efficiency. This allows us to modulate our operational footprint effortlessly, training new team members rapidly to adapt to any level of volume.Some of our call center features (which you won’t find anywhere else in the wholesale background screening industry) include:Automated integrations with third-party providers such as The Work Number, National Student Clearinghouse, and Google for seamless research that expedites the verification processCall flow engine to manage customized client experienceCustomized documentation rules per clientCustom call pattern recognition based on your individual customer needsAuto-dialer technology that increases efficiency and productivity, enabling 120% of our competitor’s call volume in the same footprintLocal caller identification to optimize call acceptance ratesComplete recordings for historical archiving and auditing purposesTargeted time-zone calling to optimize completion ratesThe option to complete verification via web and mobile, which increases our successful completion rateInteractive Voice Response (IVR) VerificationsBecause of our massive R&D investments in process and technology, we ensure the fastest turnaround times and lowest UTV rates in the industry.

We Are Continuously Improving

We have an unusual setup at InformData. Our verifications organization runs as a separate business. What that means is, rather than being a loss leader, we expect our employment verification work to generate a profit. This creates quite the incentive among our team members to continually strive for a more efficient, more accurate process - a process that is an extension of  your business.The leaders of our verification team are self-described “data geeks.” To them, every call we make is a data point, with rich potential for insights that improve our service.That’s why our team members can reel off figures like, “If you go from three calls over three days to four calls over four days, you’ll see a 5% increase in completion rate. If you make four calls in three days, you’ll get a 2.5% increase, but UTV will get worse.”We think about these things all the time, and we never rest on our laurels. We follow the evolution of call center technology closely. We can’t wait to integrate the latest developments into our system — from artificial intelligence to natural language processing — to better serve you, our CRA clients.

To some CRAs, the idea of outsourcing employment verification work may seem a little strange. If your business is like most CRAs, you’ve invested countless hours and spent considerable funds developing an in-house verifications team. And until recently, that in-house team has been sufficient.

Why would you turn an internal process over to an outside organization?

For one thing, outsourcing may be your only way out of the backlogs during this period of unprecedented demand. More importantly, it may be the only alternative to turning down work and leaving revenue on the table.

But putting aside the immediate benefits of outsourcing, consider the bigger picture.

Many CRAs consider their verifications process to be an essential ingredient in their “secret sauce.” However, as we’ll demonstrate below, outsourcing verifications to the right provider may help your business differentiate yourself from your competition with faster turnaround times, greater customization, and better completion rates.

Why outsource verifications? 3 benefits

Regardless of the state of the labor market, there are three strong reasons to consider outsourcing some or all of your verification orders:

1. Outsourcing verifications increases efficiency

Earlier in this guide, we mentioned that about two-thirds of employment verification orders must be completed manually. The other third can be handled with automated tools. Unfortunately, manual verifications dominate the bulk of researchers’ time, while automated verifications can be completed in mere moments.

Consider the efficiency boost that would come from outsourcing your manual verifications while keeping your automated orders in-house.

Released from the endless cycle of phone calls, voicemails, and waiting for return calls, your verification team members could complete a much greater volume of work, or they could take on higher-margin work from your other departments, such as criminal background checks.

2. Faster and more cost-effective onboarding and scale

Onboarding is a time-consuming chore for most CRAs. While new hires take weeks to get up-to-speed, the entire team can fall behind, missing deadlines and aggravating end-users.

In contrast, the best third-party background screening data providers have onboarding down to a science — because they’ve gone through it so many times, worked out the kinks, and honed the process. This is only possible with the industry knowledge, technology, and sheer size of an organization whose business is verifications.

3. An antidote for unpredictability

The COVID-19 crisis was only the latest (and perhaps most extreme) reminder that projecting the future staffing needs of a CRA has always been difficult, if not impossible. As we noted above, many background screening companies cut back at the height of the crisis only to find themselves short-handed and unable to rehire when demand rebounded.

An ongoing relationship with a reliable outsourced verifications provider can insulate your company from an unpredictable economy. With a trusted team of experts standing by to work on your behalf, you can focus on running your business in the present rather than worrying about what the future holds.

It’s time to take a hard look in the mirror

Outsourcing verifications is neither a failure nor a surrender. It’s simply an acknowledgment of the reality that a CRA can’t be best-in-class at every task asked of them and can only take on so much work without getting bogged down.

The economy is shifting rapidly. To flourish, your background screening business needs to remain agile and responsive. Outsourcing grants you the flexibility you need to compete and grow.

We encourage you to take an honest assessment of what your firm does well and the areas where you struggle to meet customer expectations. If verifications are holding you back, consider partnering with a direct-source data provider whose business is verifications and that has the people, processes, and technology to help you transform your verification challenges into opportunities.

We’ll introduce you to one such provider in the final chapter of this guide.

Do you have more employment verifications orders than you can handle? Do you want to grow your CRA, but resource-consuming employment verifications work is holding you back? Do you need to make verifications a variable cost instead of fixed overhead to unleash the potential in your CRA? Were you hit hard during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are you looking for a road back to profitability?

It would be our pleasure to show you how partnering with InformData can transform your employment verifications department into a lean, flexible, scalable growth machine. If you are ready to explore outsourcing your employment verifications, click here to connect with one of our experts or give us a call at 800-203-0582.