How background verification is pushing forward the adoption of automation in HR
Intelligent automation is gradually entering nearly every sector of business and governance. From self-driving cars to automatic lightening, the level of automation has now started to change the way of doing the ubiquitous manual tasks, even in conventional processes like HR. More than 13 million people are expected to enter India’s working age population annually for the next five-six years, according to a study by USB, meaning that there is a dire need of workforce intelligence and automation technologies in human resources management.
At the software level, APIs (Application Program Interfaces) are powerful tools to achieve behind the scenes automation. Businesses and software developers use APIs in their software for increased automation and efficiency. For example, Zomato has been using Google’s APIs to plot user location directly on Google maps instead of creating their own maps.
APIs help in building platforms that facilitate collaborations and data flow across various channels, and hence contribute towards creating fast and efficient work flows. Can the HR industry, which collects enormous volumes of data from various sources, benefit from API-enabled automation? The answer is yes; the combination of data collection and flow across disparate platforms; often owned by external sources; can indeed transform majority of the core HR processes.
Take recruitment for example, which has always been a document-centric process involving a lot of repetitive and transactional steps. From identifying the right candidates and interviewing, to conducting background verification and onboarding, the process requires the involvement of multiple stakeholders with varying competencies. Each step therefore takes days or sometimes even weeks or months to complete, making the entire process complex and time-consuming.
However, with the adoption of technology across sectors, the influence is clearly reflected in the progress of HR industry. With the introduction of advanced technologies like APIs, Machine Learning and NLP (Natural language processing), the process of hiring has accelerated and reduced the level of human intervention at various steps.
Once a candidate is finalized, his or her background verification is a crucial yet painstaking part of the hiring process. Verifying the antecedents helps employers make a sound hiring decision by running ex-employment, education, criminal and other important background checks on employees; however this process often takes days to complete with dozens of steps involved. Now, however, background verification companies are offering APIs that integrate directly within the HRM software and enable zero-friction background verification of a candidate. Instant background verification results help businesses build trust with candidates and vendors on the fly- anytime, anywhere. This is called ‘TrustOnDemand’
“India’s growing economy has resulted in the increase in on-demand service market that helps businesses simplify and scale up their processes. The increasing use of HRM software and technology has been of great benefit to the industry, but the introduction of APIs has led the way towards automation making the systems far more efficient,” said Ajay Trehan, Founder of AuthBridge, leading provider of tech-enabled trust on demand solutions. AuthBridge recently introduced an intelligent API platform that can be integrated with HRMs to deliver intelligent real-time verification results for individuals as well as business entities.
Contrary to the old times when the process used to take days to complete, it can now be completed within seconds without switching to multiple HRM software for each step. This level of automation helps companies in verifying the background simply by feeding the basic information of the prospective hires and get the results almost instantly. On one side while the service providers are gearing up to leverage technology for streamlining processes and building automated systems, there is also a need for HR industry to be open to adoption of technology and moving away from paper driven processes.
