Addressing a Labor Shortage: How a Comprehensive Platform for Pre-employment Screenings Streamlines Onboarding and Boosts Retention

By RJ Frasca, Vault Workforce Screening

Pair a generational shift in the mindset of better job flexibility and work/life balance with 11 million job openings nationwide, and now the United States faces one of its longest ongoing labor shortages. Many companies have had to turn to contingent workers to fill gaps, with these workers making up 28% of the average company’s workforce. 

On top of the shortage, nearly a quarter of the workforce operates remotely now, making it incredibly difficult for businesses to perform background checks and drug screenings accurately. To compound the problem, companies must spend time and money on hiring and can suffer significant financial blows when a bad hire happens. That can lead to a termination, which becomes another position to fill. Many organizations have struggled with effectively hiring while mitigating risk and ensuring the employee experience is up to par.

Prospective hires

Being able to thoroughly vet prospective hires with efficiency and accuracy is imperative to developing and retaining a competitive workforce. For employers looking for a competitive edge to fill open roles, the execution of fast, accurate, and comprehensive pre-employment background checks is critical. 

It takes extensive resources to onboard and train new staff. Thorough background screening reduces the potential of hiring an ill-fitting employee as well as the corresponding expenses. In the constantly changing climate of today’s workforce, ensuring a candidate is a safe hire is just as important as conducting employee health or drug screenings. 

A background check provides what a resume cannot, such as:

• Confirmation of a candidate’s education, training, and experience
• Alerts to criminal convictions
• Reasons for prior terminations
• Discrepancies in a candidate’s work history

Having a thorough snapshot into a candidate’s background beyond their resume offers complete visibility and verification of a candidate’s work history and possible risk types that could negatively impact a company. 

Screening solutions

A screening solution can provide modern background screening, drug testing, and occupational health care solutions for all talent acquisition needs. Implementing a platform that takes a holistic approach to develop customized programs for workforce screening solutions can ensure each company’s needs are met and its brand is kept safe. Outsourcing these processes reduces the time internal departments spend vetting candidates while ensuring the highest quality of background checks.

With a comprehensive screening service that has a clearly defined program and policy, companies can count on consistency, accuracy, and efficiency in the hiring process. With laws and regulations changing often, organizations don’t have the expertise to run background checks with an understanding of current requirements for fair hiring standards. A consumer reporting agency (CRA) expert can advise them proactively of regulatory trends that might impact them.

A workforce screening solution can speed up the hiring process by accurately and expeditiously handling the following:

• Background checks. This is a crucial component of managing risk. A slow background check result can cost a company a great candidate, and an incomplete or poorly delivered screening can impact team morale, customer confidence, and financial success. With the right screening solution, onboarding experts can work with a company to learn their workflow and processes to build custom background screenings that fit their unique needs. This means the checks can be as concise as possible, with quality assurance, but also designed to meet preferences, so employers get all the information they want and none they don’t need. All screenings comply with Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and applicable state and local regulations and have less than a day turnaround time.
• Drug screening. Drug screening is an important part of workplace safety. It helps to protect employees, customers, and the public. As more employees work remotely or are mobile during their workday, a screening solution that understands a company’s needs, as well as new and changing industry standards, is a must. With a modern solution, compliance experts can work with companies to determine which substances are most appropriate to test. This might mean virtual collections, hair, nail, blood, oral fluid, or breath alcohol testing. Partnering with a CRA means access to thousands of collection sites and a personal staff of virtual collectors. A company and its candidates have access to web-based innovative scheduling and result retrieval technology, creating an accessible, rapid, and simple screening process for all parties.
• Health screening. The health of a workforce is vital to its productivity, job satisfaction, a safe workplace, and brand reputation. Partnering with a CRA provides expert guidance and a consultative, flexible service model that can help companies stay ahead of changing compliance regulations. Employers or a CRA can schedule screenings that include physicals, tuberculosis tests, and commercial driver medical examinations (CDME). Furthermore, should an illness or injury sideline an employee, a CRA can help ensure the employee returns to work safely and in a compliant way. 

An array of benefits

There is an array of additional benefits to partnering with a CRA in the pre-employment screening process. For starters, onboarding is customized to fit industry-specific needs and provide a positive experience for the candidate and the company. The candidate experience is enhanced by streamlining the application process to give faster results. A CRA uses best-in-class technology to keep Personally Identifiable Information (PII) safe and deliver on-time and accurate background reports. These diligent screenings reduce expensive turnover costs, as statistics have shown that losing an employee can cost a company 150% of that employee’s salary. 

When hiring, quick turnaround times are critical to a company’s workforce growth and employee retention. But with the increase in demand for new employees, there’s an element of higher risk. Improving the management of specific organizational changes like pre-employment screening empowers leaders and HR professionals to protect all stakeholders from cybercrime, fraud, theft, and adverse effects on the brand. Utilizing a comprehensive platform with a compliance focus, end-to-end support and tech-enabled process management for pre-employment screenings will streamline the onboarding process and boost employee retention. It will ultimately create a safer environment, reduce risks, save time and money, and future-proof an organization’s program.

RJ Frasca joined Vault Workforce Screening in 2022. RJ brings over 25 years of strategic marketing and product experience. He has spent the last decade in the background screening space.  He has extensive experience in marketing and product management and is a well-known and respected strategist and thought leader. RJ’s responsibilities at Vault Workforce Screening include strategic oversight of all company marketing initiatives.