With Day 1 hiring around the corner, it’s now crucial that the people you recruit and hire are the exact fit for your organisation from the very beginning.
But how do you ensure that the checks you perform are adequate for the task?
Traditional background checks serve a purpose—they stack up someone’s employment history and educational background, but they often miss increasingly important data, relating to the individual’s character, company affiliations and wider network.
Here, Oli, Chief Technology Officer at YOONO explains how the UK’s new employment legislation is having real-world impact on the recruitment industry, and how technology can be used to keep ahead of the curve. Meet the new recruitment reality—data-centric candidate research that builds a complete picture without missing crucial information or introducing bias.
The future is imminent, so don’t let it pass you by.
Day 1 and data: What’s the connection?
The new Employment Rights Bill is being phased into UK law over the next couple of years, and is set to offer more solidity for workers at an earlier stage within employment. One of the most highly-anticipated changes, which has caused some concern amongst businesses, is the expected Day 1 reform, which will protect employees from unfair dismissal from the first day of employment, compared to the current two-year qualifying period.
What this means for employers is that they will have to be more certain than ever before that the individuals they hire are the right fit for the role and company culture. Probationary periods will lose the test ground impact they once had, giving all employees—including those who are poor fits or bad hires—much more staying power within a business once they’re through the door.
Imagine a scenario where an employer takes on a senior employee, who within just days or weeks of working within the business, comes under fresh scrutiny for historical misconduct, criminal action or inappropriate behaviour, due to information that was neglected or missing during the pre-employment screening process.
And this isn’t a fictional scenario. According to the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC), more than 40% of hires turn out to be bad hires within an 18 month period, equating to around 745,880 individuals who are deemed unsuitable for the role or company they were hired for.
What Day 1 will mean is that these bad hires will soon be much more difficult to dismiss, leading to impact on reputation, revenue and morale for the businesses involved.
So, that’s the scare story (true stories are often the most frightening), but how then does data fit into the equation?
The good news is that Day 1 legislation doesn’t need to spell a future of concern for employers; it’s just essential that businesses adapt their recruitment methods to suit this new hiring landscape. And that’s exactly where data becomes all-important.
If you know everything about an individual before you recruit them, such as which companies they have been involved with on a financial level, what media coverage they have received in the past (which may be hidden down the search rankings), and how they interact with others online, you can move forward with an offer with confidence, not caution.
Background research that uses intelligent data gathering to cover all bases is capable of surfacing historic information, creating connections between different data sources, and highlighting relevant or suppressed information that may be crucial for assessing if the person is a good fit.
A next-generation research tool like YOONO uses data to build a greater breadth of information into a background profile, before analysing this information to identify common patterns. For example, YOONO searches millions of keywords against thousands of publicly available data sources, in order to spot commonly used words and phrases, and identify links between these, creating a much more nuanced and contextual understanding of how the individual has spoken and been spoken about.
Traditional background checks: Are they able to adapt?
With a pressing need for improved intelligence about a candidate before an employer extends an offer, is it time to reassess whether traditional background checks are still suitable for recruiters and hirers to use?
Of course, many existing background checks still have an essential place within the hiring process. For example, a DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) check examines a person’s criminal history, which is essential for many sensitive roles, while a Right-to-Work check is also important for determining whether the individual is legally able to work within the UK.
These types of check are still essential for due diligence and legal fulfilment of many job roles, and are unlikely to not be required in the near future. However, other types of traditional background check might become redundant in face of fast-paced technology and evolving UK legislation.
With automated technology and AI, a new wave of background research tools may offer employers greater peace of mind about the people they hire. More comprehensive data analysis and identification of patterns that give greater context about somebody’s behaviour and background are becoming invaluable tools in modern recruitment.
Going beyond simply knowing the facts, these innovative forms of research tool are able to piece together a much larger and more complex jigsaw, while presenting the researcher with clear insights that allow for confident decision-making at a glance.
Insights into a candidate’s background, connections and character are becoming increasingly vital in modern hiring. With a tool like YOONO, it is possible to go beyond surface-level data, surfacing deeper meaning through AI data analysis. What this means, beyond the tech, is that in traditional background checks, candidate data can be easily lost or pushed far from your attention in a vast data pool. A research tool like YOONO effectively sifts through the sand grains, surfacing the most relevant information and connections, allowing you to view and understand complex and contextual knowledge at a glance.
Technology for the future of recruitment?
While here at YOONO we provide a background screening product, we are also convinced that the recruitment industry is changing at such a rapid pace that background check technology cannot afford to rest on its laurels. Where businesses and people intersect, complexities emerge, and increasing digital visibility means that no past action or behaviour can lie dormant for long.
At YOONO, we work to develop AI-powered candidate reports that allow you to search, analyse and present a complete picture of an individual, backed by cutting-edge data. We don’t want to leave any stone unturned, but we are also conscious that bias is a growing concern in relation to AI technology. With this in mind, we strive to create technology that mitigates bias, through ethically-built source code, publicly available information sources and bespoke options, such as anonymisation.
When it comes to anonymisation in particular, this is becoming increasingly important in relation to evolving data protection and employment rights law in the UK. To avoid introducing bias into the hiring process, YOONO offers the option to remove personal data from your background reports, concealing sensitive information such as name, age and gender before you share your findings with others.
Users can research a candidate with the confidence that their research process is compliant with UK legislation and wider ethical standards within recruitment. The fact that YOONO has been designed to only scan information from already publicly available sources online ensures that no data privacy boundaries are overstepped, yet information that could be easily overlooked with manual research will still be surfaced and brought to your attention.
The future of background research is not limited to traditional CV and credential checks; instead recruiters and employers will be able to understand a much broader context surrounding a candidate, in a fraction of the time of manual research.
With AI-powered candidate research you can also:
Build a complete network of a person’s related network and company connections.
Identify patterns of behaviour and character using sentiment tracking technology, which looks at tone and keywords to assess how the individual interacts with others.
Trace a complete timeline of their education and career, including any gaps or transitions that may be of interest to an employer.
Spot potential red flags, which may impact on candidate performance or business reputation, with AI that identifies words and images that may relate to problematic themes.
Data converted into intelligence
With so many new AI technologies on the market, it can be difficult to know which software to adopt into your hiring process, if at all.
At YOONO, we don’t view AI as a way to make our service appear futuristic or the ‘next best thing’—we use AI as a building block, among many others, to create a holistic research tool that combines innovative technology with human-centric thinking. We understand that when you are recruiting people, the human variations in character and context contribute to a nuanced and highly sensitive hiring market that AI, if used alone, simply wouldn’t be up to the task of comprehending.
We use the insights and experience of our (very human) team to contribute diverse input that humanises our AI technology, drawing the focus back to mitigating bias, providing the best user experience possible and producing results that really do ensure you find the ultimate culture fit for your organisation.
If you want to find out more about how data converts into candidate intelligence, we’d love to talk to you about it, or read more about how AI is rapidly changing the face of the recruitment industry.