You provide us information and we start looking through millions of records to find any that match to the person you tell us is applying at your organization. There is no doubt about it, an individual person could not do what our technological applications are able to do. That is the joy of the technology age we are in. Of course, with the joys come some fundamental challenges that we as an organization and you as our client face every day.
Below are the primary challenges we see as we attempt to do our job of “record matching” for you.
Incomplete information provided.
More often than not, the problem we as a screening firm faces is that the information provided by our clients is insufficient for us to be able to find the record that ends up being found. A slightly different spelling, a typo in what is submitted, a failure to run a search on a former/nickname/alias name, a missing middle initial or suffix – all of these “incomplete” submissions result in one thing – missed records or wrong records.
The good news is that you can do several things to improve your results immediately: (a) require applicants to fill out every part of your application and do not accept the application unless all parts are completed, (b) run a search on every nickname/former name/alias name provided, (c) double check your work before “submitting” your application, (d) verify results when you review your report before making any decisions, (e) properly follow all adverse action procedures to notify your candidate of returned records – giving them a chance to note any corrections – before making a decision. Take charge now of the information you submit and realize the improved results.
PII protected.
PII is a term that has become common place in our technological society. It stands for “private identifying information” and is synonymous with the term “privacy”. The irony is that the more we as a society try to protect our privacy, the less we can verify that a person is who they say they are. Eliminating identifying information from records eliminates our ability to verify the history about someone.
As a screening firm, we believe that empowering people to seek protection of appropriately private information should be available through both private and public institutional process (non-disclosure and private information processes) and judicial process (expungement of records and sealing of records for example). However, drawing lines to ensure that safety of others is valued above or at least equal to privacy of information is critical in our mind. When i think of the value on the life of a child relative to the value of one’s right to keep their former sex offense private, I have no problem saying that protecting the life of the child wins.
Of course, privacy debates are not always that simple and certainly we as society are debating the issues at present. What can you as our client do? Understand that name match only results happen when private identifying information is missing from public and private business records. Understand the limitation of name match only records and do not make decisions relying on those without going through a process of attempting to verify the results with the applicant.
PeopleFacts will be rolling out this year a mandatory email address feature in the upcoming months to help us verify reports with your applicants in real time as we deliver information to you. We invite you to join us in this important step of progress designed to combat incomplete public records and protect the rights of applicants as well as to minimize claims against you, our clients.
Upgrade your application process now to require your applicants to provide a current and valid email address. As we said above, PeopleFacts is always making progress!
