Digital credentials will help facilitate frictionless screening

The gig econ­o­my has trans­formed the labour mar­ket over the last decade, dri­ven by the rise of com­pa­nies such as Uber and Deliv­eroo. A study last year by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hert­ford­shire found that one in ten work­ing-age adults in the UK now work in the gig econ­o­my, which is twice as many as there were in 2016. How­ev­er, its grow­ing influ­ence is expos­ing the chal­lenges that exist in the area of can­di­date screen­ing and onboard­ing.

Tra­di­tion­al ref­er­enc­ing pro­ce­dures con­tin­ue to be labour inten­sive, often delayed while wait­ing for com­pa­nies to respond. Every organ­i­sa­tion has their own pol­i­cy on ref­er­enc­ing and employ­ers often pro­vide the same ref­er­ence on mul­ti­ple occa­sions, as peo­ple move from job to job. This can delay the screen­ing process and impact onboard­ing time­frames. And with all the focus now on cul­ture, ampli­fied by increas­es in remote work­ing, human resources teams want both a quick­er turn­around and a bet­ter under­stand­ing of can­di­dates.

“Ref­er­enc­ing has always been a chal­lenge and there’s often a sense of Ground­hog Day and dupli­ca­tion of effort,” says Georgina Wil­son, direc­tor of strat­e­gy and plan­ning at Vero Screen­ing, the largest UK inde­pen­dent employ­ment screen­ing com­pa­ny. “Par­tic­u­lar­ly when mov­ing quick­ly between roles, the need to repeat ref­er­enc­ing pro­ce­dures can frus­trate both the can­di­dates, who have to go through the same process and delays, and HR because it’s a cost­ly and admin-heavy task.

“And the days of ref­er­ences which gath­er detailed feed­back are large­ly gone. These days, it tends more towards a basic, tick-box quan­ti­ta­tive assess­ment of a person’s time with com­pa­nies, based on dates of employ­ment and posi­tion held.”

New data pro­tec­tion reg­u­la­tions, such as the Gen­er­al Data Pro­tec­tion Reg­u­la­tion, which give data sub­jects more con­trol over their per­son­al data, part­ly solve these issues by allow­ing peo­ple to request access to their pre­vi­ous screen­ing reports and then share them with new employ­ers. But how can employ­ers be con­fi­dent in the valid­i­ty of such reports, com­ing direct­ly from the prospec­tive employ­ee as they do?

Pow­ered by blockchain, dig­i­tal cre­den­tials will address the issue of authen­tic­i­ty and cred­i­bil­i­ty, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly speed­ing up employ­ment ver­i­fi­ca­tion dra­mat­i­cal­ly and dri­ving down costs. This will leave time and mon­ey for HR to focus on gain­ing a more holis­tic view of can­di­dates.

In this mod­el, employ­ers can shift their focus to com­ple­men­tary ser­vices, such as social media screen­ing which offer a bet­ter sense of an indi­vid­ual and have more direct rel­e­vance to cul­ture. These emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies will enable a more qual­i­ta­tive, employ­ee-focused approach to screen­ing, with faster turn­arounds bet­ter suit­ed to today’s more flu­id work­force, which moves around at pace.

“We read about blockchain every­where at the moment. It’s being lever­aged in all sorts of sec­tors and while it’s not at the fore­front of the HR sec­tor at the moment, we’ve seen a lot of move­ment over the last year, par­tic­u­lar­ly since the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic hit, and it’s start­ing to hap­pen,” says Steve Woodrough, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at Vero Screen­ing.

“It cer­tain­ly needs to. Automa­tion tech­nolo­gies are speed­ing up recruit­ing process­es, but the aver­age can­di­date screen­ing process can still take up to ten days, which is just not accept­able in the gig econ­o­my where peo­ple need to be onboard much quick­er. Blockchain will help accel­er­ate that.”

There are still hur­dles to over­come before dig­i­tal cre­den­tials and self-sov­er­eign iden­ti­ty are inte­grat­ed into screen­ing process­es. It’s a very large, com­plex mod­el with many stake­hold­ers – data sub­ject, own­er, issuer, recip­i­ent – spread across mil­lions of dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als around the world. The Veloc­i­ty Net­work Foun­da­tion, which Vero has joined, is look­ing to estab­lish the mod­el around which data will start to be shared, with com­pa­nies and their HR sys­tems feed­ing into an “inter­net of careers” ecosys­tem.

“Screen­ing will still be crit­i­cal to the safe onboard­ing of new employ­ees. But with dig­i­tal CVs we’ll be able to use ver­i­fied infor­ma­tion to speed up and enhance the process. We can then shift our focus to dynam­ic rather than sta­t­ic checks,” says Woodrough. “Can­di­dates will car­ry with them a cer­ti­fied pro­fes­sion­al his­to­ry, includ­ing qual­i­fi­ca­tions and roles with oth­er employ­ers. That’s the sta­t­ic cre­den­tials. Then we can lay­er on top the dynam­ic checks that change over time to pro­vide a quick, com­pre­hen­sive and ful­ly up-to-date report, trans­form­ing the screen­ing process.”

For more infor­ma­tion and to find out more about Vero’s range of screen­ing ser­vices, please vis­it www.veroscreening.com

Pro­mot­ed by Vero Screen­ing