How Your Organization Can Benefit from Integrated ATS and Background Check Solutions
By integrating, or connecting, your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) with your background check platform, you can quickly and easily provide a more efficient and much friendlier candidate experience.
Bah, humbug! ‘Tis the season for curmudgeons, and Ebenezer Scrooge is your paragon of grumpiness. The man was irked by virtually everything. If he were here today, ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future notwithstanding, he’d probably bemoan how frustrating it is when some phone support rep tells him to provide his name and account number, after he’d already spent five minutes entering it following the tedious recorded voice prompts. If he ever had to apply for a job, Scrooge would undoubtedly go ballistic dealing with an applicant tracking system (ATS) that isn’t integrated with the background screening or onboarding systems. “I already answered all of this information before,” he’d harrumph. “Why in the world do I have to do it again?”
He shouldn’t have to. Neither should your candidates. There’s a simple way HR professionals can avoid frustrating, irritating, and possibly even dissuading job applicants.
The answer is, in a word, integration. By integrating, or connecting, your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) with your background check platform, you can quickly and easily provide a more efficient and much friendlier candidate experience. Your HR department and your candidates will cheer. So would old Ebenezer.
Why integrate your ATS and background screening systems?
Integrations provide significant and measurable business benefits. They streamline processes, eliminate multiple data entries and associated errors, and achieve time-to-business value much faster.
In addition to smoothing out the process, integrated solutions typically eliminate multiple interfaces. This leads to a better user experience and simplified training (which, in turn, might also help save on training costs).
An integrated screening solution may also provide end-to-end views of the hiring process, providing greater transparency and a better overview of the status of a candidate. ATS users will not have to jump back and forth from one system to another in order to view the screening results. Ultimately, this provides an opportunity to measure and evaluate analytics for your organization’s HR processes.
Not to be forgotten, of course, is the positive impact that this will have on the candidate's experience. In an increasingly tight labor market, employers must ensure that they respect the time and effort of the talent pool. Should they really need to re-enter duplicate information? Candidates perceive this to be an unnecessary burden. And they’re quite comfortable sharing their anger and frustration with your organization to leagues of other candidates on social media. That’s something no company can afford, especially when it is so easily avoided.
Embed Video: Integrating Your ATS with the HireRight Platform
What to look for in an integrated background solution
Anyone can create an integration with an ATS. However, not all integrations are equal. In many cases, the integration is provided as an afterthought. A sound practice is to look for vendors who have created an integration that is treated as a stand-alone product. The integration should be central to the company’s strategy and come complete with its own dedicated roadmap. You can provide your organization a greater sense of security by focusing on such a ‘productized’ or repeatable integration because the vendor will be committed to delivering a robust solution. Integrations should be developed jointly between the screening and ATS vendors. We should point out that an integration using middleware that is not “certified,” or jointly supported or built, can cause a lot of confusion and trigger support issues.
Because an integration involves multiple vendors (the ATS vendor and the screening provider), it is also very important to look for a screening provider who has an exceptionally strong partner ecosystem and whose system ingrates smoothly with most popular ATS programs.
Technology continues to make our lives increasingly efficient. Think one-click purchasing, free two-day shipping, posting to Insta, FB and Twitter at once, or even fresh, pre-prepped meals delivered to your door. So it goes without saying (but we’ll say it anyway) that the employment process should keep up. An ATS with a screening integration will go a long way in creating satisfied candidates. And keep away those grumps and grouches and curmudgeons.
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Release Date: December 19, 2018
HireRight
HireRight is a leading provider of on-demand employment background checks, drug and health screening, and electronic Form I-9 and E-Verify solutions that help employers automate, manage and control background screening and related programs.