Michael Cooley, President and CEOIn an interview with Manage HR, Michael Cooley, President and CEO of Absolute Background Search INC, shares his insights on how the company leverages its expertise and scalable AI technology to perform employee background checks efficiently, helping clients make their hiring decisions before other employers competing for the same talent.
Response to Market Challenges and Trends
One of the major challenges facing employers is the consistent long turnaround time that often keeps them from hiring the best team. Most applicants apply for multiple jobs and take the first offer. Background checks are the bottleneck. This is primarily due to the governmental entities’ lack of adequate resources and staff to efficiently respond to the growing number of employment criminal history queries and redaction of identifying information. Committed to addressing this issue, we deploy highly-trained/certified and vetted researchers equipped with a personal device (phone or tablet). They capture every piece of information while at the courthouse and return results in less than one quarter of the time when compared to other employment screeners. We also leverage our relationships throughout the industry and with courthouses to quickly gather records. This enables us to respond to clients’ requests within 24 to 48 hours, while our competitors usually take weeks, if not months, to deliver. As a result, our clients typically offer positions 3 to 5 days before others, getting the cream of the crop.
Organizations also struggle with the process of gathering all needed information from candidates. Our automated Secure Mobile Applicant Record Tracking (SMART) automates much of the data collection, proactively gathering the needed releases and authorizations at the time of the applicant data entry. It allows the employment background check data entry to be largely completed online by the applicant (Smart Device Compatible). The Authorization, Disclosure, and Certification as well as State Specific releases can be done with one simple email invitation. All required releases/documents are maintained by ABS, Inc.
Even if something more is needed or additional communication with the candidate is required, the Absolute team takes the applicant ownership seriously, by contacting applicants directly to reduce the labor expended by clients’ HR Team. All required paperwork, including state specific release forms, authorization forms, and the adverse action process are handled directly by ABS—all free and part of the consultative service approach.
Most employers are held captive by companies “acting like” a credit reporting agency or background check company that bundle numerous services with employee screening (benefits, payroll, etc..), claiming to save money by bundling. Background checks are not Car/Homeowners Insurance. You would not buy groceries from a new car dealer just because you use your car to go get groceries. Why would you trust a payroll company to perform, possibly, the most important liability reduction piece of the hiring process? Pre-employment background checks should be performed by professionals, not by companies trying to make an extra buck at the employers’ expense.
As an agile firm, we always adopt a proactive approach to solve the challenges in the employee background screening process.
The Unique Value Propositions of Absolute Background Search
A patented AI-powered search option lies at the core of our offerings, a live and breathing Smart Search® mechanism for applicants’ criminal background searches. Our Smart Search® technology takes into account the ever-changing jurisdictions and records storage and search across the nation and produces accurate reports with the assistance of our compliance experts and AI. Our solution discloses only what our clients can legally use, based on their state of employment. Many CRAs report everything they see, and this causes employers to make decisions based upon non-compliant information. ABS ensures that clients never have access to any unauthorized records, without missing the compliant records important for hiring decisions. This is how we have maintained a perfect compliance record for the entire life of our business.
Our HR Management system is also designed to allow HR managers to reduce the amount of information that goes out to the hiring managers. After the background check is completed and the candidate is screened, recruiters/hiring managers know whether a candidate meets the job role requirements through an automated response predetermined by HR. This helps HR managers reduce the liability of sharing candidates’ background details with Team Members without the need to know.
Formulating the Right Solutions for Clients
At Absolute Background Search, the process of delivering the best-fit solutions to our clients begins with a learning curve, where we gain a complete view of their business processes, culture, and concerns. This is followed by an indepth assessment to identify customers’ background check requirements and assist them in establishing a background check process based on their needs and related local employment laws and the FCRA. We then focus on enhancing our clients’ operations by leveraging our technologies and accordingly design customized solutions reducing completion time without sacrificing accuracy.
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We excel in offering timeliness, due diligence, compliance, and screening that clients require for every employment position
Our team of industry experts then explains and applies state and local requirements of record reporting for the candidates and complies with those requirements while providing our services. In this regard, we keep a special focus on the data integrity of the candidates. We can also assign position-specific background check packages and add interview questions when candidates fill out application forms for better screening. Finally, we provide a wide array of tools that allow employers to adjudicate and inspect every record report prior to hiring decisions. We also have an applicant invitation system that allows candidate to enter all of their information.
Assisting Clients with their Employee Background Screening Needs
We recently collaborated with a large nonprofit hospital group in New Jersey struggling with their employee background screening. For many years, they collected county and statewide criminal records from a provider who levied a lot of hidden charges. When we came onboard, we charged them a single fee for county and state records, reducing their expenditure by 60 percent and provided them with more complete coverage than they had been previously receiving.
In another instance, our collaboration with a large corporation highlighted our capabilities of providing quick turnaround times. The client was struggling with background check response times in Texas, California and Florida, which was two to three weeks for each record. As a result, they were losing two out of every three candidates. Our researchers, well-versed in Fair Credit Reporting Act compliance for background checks, did the background search singlehandedly using our quality assurance protocol method and provided the results consistently within one day.
It comes as no surprise that many companies trust and continue to choose us for our unrivalled capabilities and long-standing experience and compliance records. We are a founding member of the PBSA (Public Background Screeners Association (PBSA) and have pioneered many of the best practices regularly used in the Pre-Employment and Tenant screening sectors to this day. We excel in offering timeliness, due diligence, compliance, and screening that clients require for every employment position.
