Background Screening and Your Employer Brand

Employer brand is a term referred to describe a company’s reputation and popularity from a potential employer’s perspective and describes the values a company gives to its employees.

Why is this so important now? Many large and public companies suffered from bad press during the pandemic; an employer’s actions during a crisis are magnified by the employees whose health and safety may have been put in jeopardy. It’s hard to measure the impact on an employer brand, but it is an important factor for attracting talent and retaining employees.

Additionally, in our current labor market, recruiting and talent acquisition teams are working harder than ever to maintain a robust talent pipeline, and employer brand can be a huge factor in your ability to bring in qualified candidates.

A strong employer brand doesn’t just impact how candidates feel about your company. It has an incredibly positive effect on employee engagement and retention. Employer branding allows you to reach qualified candidates, who turn into employees committed to your brand’s vision that become part of your talent community. It impacts every aspect of the hiring lifecycle, from attraction to recruitment to engagement and retention.

Your Employer Brand = Your Company’s Reputation 

For the first time in the PBSA and HR.com’s annual Background Screening Trends survey’s five-year history, protecting company reputation is ranked higher than legal and regulatory requirements. In 2021, the top three reasons for conducting background checks were to protect employees and customers (76%), to improve the quality of hires (52%), and to protect company reputation (41%).

In today’s talent marketplace, employers are fighting to attract and retain a smaller pool of candidates. The candidate journey has changed. Candidates want to know more about your company and what it stands for before they apply to open jobs.

Background screening is increasingly being seen as a tool to make sure organizations have the right workforce and a strong reputation in the marketplace.

In short, good branding attracts better candidates, and background screening protects your brand.

How Candidate Experience Impacts Your Employer Brand 

Candidate experience is the perception of a job seeker about an employer based on the interaction during the complete recruitment process. This includes all points of contact during the recruiting lifecycle, from pre-application to the application, the screening and interview process, and onboarding. A positive candidate experience makes your brand more attractive to the talent marketplace; a negative candidate experience can inhibit your company’s ability to recruit qualified talent and potentially damage your company’s reputation.

Optimizing the application process to be candidate friendly, communicating each step in the process with candidates, and providing feedback are all crucial elements of a good candidate experience. Background screening is an integral part of the candidate experience and candidate expectations are high.

The background screening process should be fast, efficient and include as few touchpoints with the candidate as possible. Candidates are looking for mobile accessibility and a simple user experience. Just as with your application process, requiring candidates to fill out duplicate information at different stages of the hiring process can be frustrating.

Background screening can serve to engage candidates as long as they know where they are in your hiring process. Keep them advised of next steps and why each is important, make sure they have access to the portal to check their own status, and communicate swiftly if there is any delay in the process.

Three more ways background screening can help improve your candidate experience:

Integrating your ATS with your background screening provider can streamline the process. With Cisive, for example, an integration can help your HR department initiate the background check process without leaving your ATS platform. This can speed your time to hire, increase efficiency in onboarding, increase accuracy of the information required for background screening, safeguard your candidates’ personal information, and ensure compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) disclosure and authorization process.

Cisive’s onboarding solution provides a real-time view into the status of current and past background checks and offers a customizable dashboard that enables HR teams to easily manage tasks associated with the new-hire process. It also allows remote applicants to complete onboarding documents such as employment applications and direct deposit forms quickly and easily.

Not everyone has a scanner for documents, and many of us have been working from home offices on laptops, tablets and phones. ​​Cisive’s mobile device document uploader provides a fast and easy way for candidates and HR professionals to securely send virtually any supporting documentation required during the background screening process—from W-2 forms and passports to licenses and diplomas. When selecting a document upload tool, ensure it offers encryption technology to keep candidates’ information secure.

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