As spoken by our Product Lead, Ryan Hart
When Ryan isn't dreaming up the next greatest screening solution for HR, he can be found reading Calvin and Hobbes to his 2 beautiful daughters.
At Verified First, 2018 brought us success, growth and knowledge. This isn’t to say that we didn’t find roadblocks-- we’re constantly working to improve for our clients and partners. By reflecting on these challenges as well as our successes, we feel more ready than ever for what’s ahead in 2019.
The Achievement
A biggest achievement of the year was winning “the up-and-coming HR Technology for 2018” HRO Today iTalent award for our patent-pending, home-grown software integration solutions. At the event, I was honored to present our integration capabilities to industry-experts Gerry Crispin, Principal & Co-Founder of CareerXroads; Elliot Clark, CEO of SharedXpertise & HRO Today; Bill Filip, Managing Director of investment bank Delancey Street Partners; and Johnny Campbell, CEO of SocialTalent.
They related to what I explained as the ongoing pain experienced by talent acquisition professionals and candidates as a result of poorly integrated HR systems. It’s frustrating for HR to hear from just about every HCM software provider who states they can or do integrate, only to find the implementation time took around eight weeks, burned a hole in their pocket, and has yet to fulfill the promise of a ‘streamlined solution.’
The Journey
When we listened to HR’s hiring challenges, we considered everything. How can we improve candidate experience? How can we reduce time to hire? How do we integrate without having to ask our clients to lift a finger, or spend more money? Verified First built a solution from scratch that can take five minutes to get up and running, and for free. If there isn’t an existing integration between our and another’s software, we can usually create the integration in just thirty minutes. The result is our client customer satisfaction beyond implementation scores an industry-high of 96%, and our customers voted us an HRO Today Baker’s Dozen award winner this past year. What the iTalent award judging panel concluded was that not only does our screening solution save resources (funds, staff) for providers, clients, and partners, but creates a better experience for all those involved in the hiring process, while helping to reduce the all-so-critical metric, time to hire. For many of us in our fast-paced, demanding jobs, anywhere even near eight weeks to get a software integration live is simply not feasible. Those without integrated software endure the inconvenience of logging into multiple systems to complete the hiring process, slowing down our ability to get candidates hired faster than the competing offers coming at them. Not to mention being able to track and report on our talent acquisition goals - pulling and compiling data from multiple locations only to tell hiring managers and management that the time to fill goal wasn’t met - again. One of my favorite sayings is “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” That speaks to how we’re thinking about our products-- we’re trying to make the workflows more powerful, yet more simple.Our solution is so simple that we’ve been able to complete more than 100 integrations for clients and partners in just over one year. We’ve gotten to the point with our software integration solutions we can tell our partners, “This is essentially a five minute process and one you don’t have to pay for.” It’s funny in a way-- as technologists, we’re not necessarily creating new technologies, but creating new applications for them.
The Rules
From a product development standpoint, there are top things that I’ve seen pay off this year.
1) When you’re scoping out projects, do the research and planning you need to do ahead of time so that you can execute a project near-flawlessly on the first try.
2) Get the buy-in you need, not the buy-in you don’t.
3) Listen, learn, share. When our sales engineers have discussions with clients and partners, they share the insights they heard with everyone who touches the planning through development and beyond. It’s a simple strategy to know what to build and refine, and to best address our client’s wants and needs.
The Horizon
In 2018, we created integration solutions that saves our clients’ money and time. In 2019, we’re excited to continue our quest of continuous improvement in serving our clients, creating solutions with partners, and being inspired by our competitors. Last year, I worked with talented teams across Verified First to really change the way we can think about background screening. Too many background screening companies think of background checks as files - we think of them as people. We believe we have a responsibility to continue to move screening from being thought of as merely checking the box on a candidate’s viability to be hired, but to ensure that the candidate and the talent acquisition professionals have the best, fastest hiring experience, have the best possible new hire, and have the best opportunity to keep their workplace and their customers safe.
