HR Technology Partnerships in Action: Driving Customer Success Through Integration and Innovation

While the word “recruitment” brings up images of handshakes and interviews in brightly lit rooms, much of candidate management actually takes place behind the scenes. As the hidden backbone of hiring, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) streamline recruitment and onboarding tasks, freeing up HR professionals’ time to focus on strategic initiatives and build connections. This partnership plays an especially important role during the background screening process, which often shapes candidates’ first impression of their new employer.

In the latest episode of FA Live, we invited Matt Gay, Head of Sales, and Harris Bornstein, Vice-President of Global Partnerships at First Advantage, to talk about the role of ATS and HRIS partnerships in hiring and onboarding. Here are their answers to some of the top questions customers ask about integrations.

How do partnerships and sales come together to create value for our customers?

Customers already have a trusted relationship with their ATS. By forming a partnership with their ATS provider, our sales team builds on these existing connections to create the best possible experience for both their HR managers and their candidates.

Why are partnerships and integration such a critical part of background checks today?

Having the ability to order and manage screening through a single system brings tremendous value to customers. Integrations are no longer used exclusively to streamline the pre-employment process – they are also involved at other parts of the candidate journey, like identity at the start of the hiring funnel and ongoing screening and monitoring performed to tap into an active employee base.

When digital identity and background screening are executed smoothly, they can have a huge positive impact on the candidate experience while dramatically improving hiring efficiency. By partnering with the different ATS and Human Capital Management (HCM) platforms, First Advantage builds intuitive processes for both candidates and recruiters in order to deliver a frictionless, high-quality experience.

How do Integrations help simplify and speed up hiring?

Integrating identity into the screening and hiring process within one system is crucial in eliminating a lot of doubt upfront. By first verifying identity you’re running your background check with validated identity data. There’s better confidence that you’re getting your screen back on the right person, checking the right jurisdictions, and searching the right names. Consistency in data also mitigates risk of manual data-entry errors and inaccuracies and reducing the need for candidates to re-enter data.

What are the main strengths of First Advantage’s partner ecosystem?

While we will never be able to integrate with everyone, we’re able to accommodate at least 90% of the top talent acquisition and management platforms. When we lack a current integration with a customer’s ATS, we offer APIs that will allow them or the ATS to build upon our solution. If one of our partners has a specific industry niche, we ensure we have key knowledge of this niche to better serve customers if the need comes up.

What are the biggest hiring and compliance challenges that organizations are facing today across your supported industries?

Matt’s team supports sectors that involve high volume hiring and non-regulated knowledge workers, including staffing, retail, hospitality, gig, financial services, professional business services, technology, media, and entertainment. Across all these industries, recurring themes include driving efficiency, using less resources, and reducing turnaround time without sacrificing accuracy.

Identity fraud is another prevailing concern, with employers worried that bad actors might infiltrate their company by manipulating biographical data and introducing risk into their workplace.

Organizations that hire at a high volume place a particular emphasis on speed and simplicity, which means they want an integration that reduces candidate friction and accelerates the onboarding process. For companies looking for non-regulated knowledge workers, like technology and finance organizations, every hiring decision is high stakes. Therefore, they prioritize compliance and qualifications, while avoiding any cumbersome experience that might discourage their candidates and have a negative impact on their brand.

How is First Advantage helping to solve customers’ most common challenges through integrations?

Our partnerships go beyond technology to form strategic relationships with both our integration providers and our customers. We create partner roadmaps that help us keep in mind client needs and build integrations that leverage the full power of their ATS or HCM platform. As a result, we build seamless or near seamless experiences that are functional, intuitive, and impactful. Some of our most successful partnerships have been those where we’ve identified ways we can help improve efficiency or enhance an offering within an industry.

What is the most common question you get from customers?

Most companies’ integrations have certain baseline functionalities. Therefore, they want to know what enhancements we offer beyond the basics and what we can do to go above and beyond what’s been possible before. Here at First Advantage, we’ve tapped into digital identity to help mitigate identity fraud and improve the overall background screening experience from start to finish.

Once a customer has chosen to integrate First Advantage with their ATS or HRIS solution, what does the implementation process look like?

We have a thoughtful approach to implementation that goes beyond “plug and play.” We take everything we’ve learned from the sales engagement, approaching it as a consultation and trying to understand the goals and objectives of each customer.

We also want to leverage the benchmarking data we’ve acquired from our large customer base to identify common approaches and practices from similar programs. That’s where our project management experts come into play. They create a detailed project plan to make sure everyone involved is aligned and that we have clear deliverables and timelines.

Once a plan is in place, it’s now implementation time. We configure workflows and build permissions, tailoring the experience to each customer’s needs. Then we pass to the testing stage, which is usually the longest. We’ll run thorough User Acceptance Tests to confirm that everything works as expected.

Once the customer is satisfied, we go live and transfer the account into the hands of our trusted customer success partners who are responsible for ongoing maintenance.

What role do our partners play in this integration process?

Our strong relationships with our partners allow us to readily access their teams when appropriate or when needed. That’s true whether we need general support in our build or in testing, or if we just need to hop on a call with the customer to ask the right questions or suggest a better way to approach an issue.

What trends do you see shaping the future of background screening?

Identity is top of mind for employers today, and with good reason. Based on Gartner’s research, 1 in 4 candidates could be fraudulent by 2028. Securing identity data seems no longer negotiable if employers want to hire with confidence.

AI and automation are also generating lots of interest. Companies want to know how they can use AI to improve the speed and accuracy of their work, and how to create better experiences for their recruiters and their candidates.

In our space in particular, changes in applicable laws for employers in the hiring process continue to come-up, such as with Fair Chance and Ban the Box initiatives. Organizations are looking for agile partners whose platforms are robust enough to help them manage those different requirements.

There’s a growing need for ongoing/continuous screening and employee background screening “monitoring” services across all industries, especially regulated industries. We’re currently looking into ways we can enable continuous screening on the talent and human capital management side, whether that means driver/motor vehicle records or criminal records monitoring.

Demand is also increasing for integrations and industry-specific solutions outside the US as companies expand across international borders. Here, an international provider with a strong global presence can prove particularly valuable by providing local expertise and guidance informed by experience.

From accelerating recruitment to improving trust with employees and customers, robust partnerships help HR professionals meet their staffing objectives and strengthen their relationships. With a large partner ecosystem and strong ties within the industry, First Advantage is particularly well equipped to accompany you on your hiring journey.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you streamline your hiring program and face the challenges of today’s job market.