It has become imperative for all businesses, whether they’re SMEs or Enterprises to use technology to transform their HR practices. In parallel, we’re also at a time when it is essential to acquire and retain the right talent within the organization. At this juncture, one HR process which requires an urgent digital transformation is that of Background Verification Process. Background Verification (BGV) is an imperative tool to making intelligent and informed hiring decisions and has deep roots in business risk, compliance, and data security. Owing to remote working brought on by the pandemic, this situation presented with unprecedented risks and reinforced the need for digital transformation in BGV.

The benefits offered by the employee background verification go a long way in evading the potential risks, safeguarding the interests of clients, and the reputation of the organisation. This establishes credence with employees and clients. While conducting any background verification it is important to drive compliance in alignment with what an organization signs off with customers to protect their data or resources. However, there are internal and external challenges that organizations face in operationalizing the whole process and ensuring compliance. Hiring thousands of employees every month at a global level, formulating processes and policies for background verification that can act as a guide in case of varying international regulations coupled with linguistic, legal and other cultural and social differences are challenges faced by any organization. Delay in the closure of verification could lead to a loss in revenue and non-compliance poses a reputational risk as well.

CHALLENGES

• Nonstandard Processes: The complexity of the BGV process gets compounded because of different approaches being followed by different industries and customers. Moreover, geographically dispersed teams present a significant challenge in defining a standard and integrated process for verification of candidates.
  
  
• Varying geography norms and local laws: Not every country, and not even every jurisdiction within certain countries, allows or follows background checks on similar norms. Those that do allow most often require the consent of the candidate. The privacy laws of different countries demand different disclosure norms and therefore adherence becomes complex.
• Country-based partners and their available tools: There are not many global partners available in this space and those present depend largely on sub-contracting to local partners. Therefore, speed and adherence to standard operating procedures becomes difficult.
• Language dependency: In most countries, basic communication and official documentation written in local languages poses an obstacle to the verification process. Documents need to be verified in a variety of languages with different countries and customer-specified norms complicating it further.

Disruptive Technology intervention

An integrated and standardized BGV process can address the hurdles any organization faces. A reliable and highly efficient BGV process can be achieved through technology integration and by adopting automation. The implementation of IT governance mechanisms and analytics in the BGV process ensures compliance and imbibes confidence among stakeholders. 

• Configurable Connected Platform on Cloud: Creating a straight-through process and introducing a configurable platform on the cloud that can connect to the APIs of a partner for a seamless process. This platform will map the right checks as specified by an organization or its customers, the regulatory requirements, and necessary data privacy norms. Tracking the whole verification journey at different stages to monitor progress without any manual intervention will help in defining SLAs, managing quality, and creating a data repository for further analytics.
• Hyper Automation: The introduction of an intelligent system to identify variations, configure defined verification criteria during employee movement, and define complex data structures leading to an automated workflow through auto-initiation will make the process seamless.
• Cognitive solution for quality: A cognitive layer on the platform can identify quality issues, and anomalies against applied rules which will help not only in substantial improvement in Turn Around Time but could also build a protection layer against any non-compliance either for a statutory requirement or against contractual obligations. The cognitive solution can also be deployed for extracting the contractual requirement as documented in a Master Service Agreement by deploying Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning (ML).

A standardized and integrated BGV process with minimal to no human intervention is the most sought-after solution by any organization. Leveraging state-of-the-art technology in Background Verification essentially creates a compliant and confident workforce who can be relied on to work with sensitive information, even while operating remotely. The transformation also reduces the number of bottlenecks and manual processing thereby lowering the cycle time, making the process speedy, secure, and more efficient, and improving the overall service quality. 

The future of BGV belongs to technology and the future is now.