Online Employee Background Check Question and Answer Series from HireSafe: Why Do We Use online Documents and Forms? Why not Paper or Fax?

There are many reasons why HireSafe uses digital signatures and online forms for our screening services. Among the most important are accuracy, information security and legal compliance.

Accuracy

By using our secure web portal potential hires can fill in their own address history and background information. This has many positive effects. Firstly, it lowers costs for your company by eliminating the need to transpose candidates answers to another form in our office or yours. It also limits errors that arise from deciphering illegible handwriting, or errors from erroneous data entry from staff trying to transpose paper forms to digital format. When the candidate fills in their own information you can be sure they won’t be misspelling their own name or entering an incorrect birth date.

Errors with candidate data entry directly affect the screening’s outcome. With an incorrect last name, birthdate, address or other information our searches could turn up nothing when a candidate has a criminal record. Digital information provided directly from the candidate increases report accuracy tremendously while reducing costs.

Information Security

Paper and emailed documents are only secure as the individual systems they travel through and when dealing with potential employees it is never certain what sort of environment you may be sharing sensitive information within. A compromised system may be sharing sensitive personal information, social security numbers and company data without you even knowing. For a long time now faxing documents has not been considered secure and can be easily coopted allowing sensitive information shared via fax to end up in the wrong hands.

Faxing was once considered secure, but these systems are susceptible to hackers and more than that have a very high potential for human error. If someone along the line accidently dials an incorrect number, the effects can be devastating and must be investigated when dealing with sensitive information. Most companies use a scan to fax system that involves sending data through a private server. However, there is no way to determine whether those servers are secure as the companies providing them offer no promise of security.

To protect our clients, our business and the many potential employees we screen daily we secure all data with a two-factor authenticated and well protected web portal. By securing sensitive documents through TazWork’s web portal we ensure the highest security possible ensuring your information will be safe.

Digitally documents all route through our partner TazWork’s servers secured with AWS cloud storage. These secure services protect company, and potential hire information against unauthorized access with multi-factor authentication, sufficient firewalls and intrusion detection. Visit our data security page to Learn more about how HireSafe keeps our client’s and their employee’s data secure.

Legal Compliance

With employee background screening there are ever changing FCRA, EEOC and local laws changes that must be incorporated into candidate provided documents. With these compliant documents being provided automatically our clients are protected from lawsuits. While in the past HireSafe regularly updated these documents to provide them to our clients we soon found that regulation’s pace exceeded our ability to maintain compliant documentation. There was also no way for our office to force our clients to print new forms every time an update occurred. To alleviate these issues HireSafe uses digital documents to keep our clients safe from FCRA or other lawsuits.

Our online services are ideal for handling constant updates to local regulations and FCRA compliance. When a client requests a background check through our servers the correct FCRA compliant documents and required local documents are always provided. With thousands of clients all over the US, it would be impossible to ensure that each of them had the most up to date documents and that they were using them in accordance with FCRA regulations.

Using online documents and forms keeps our clients, their employees and candidates safe while lowering costs for your business. Accurate reporting from the source through secure servers helps HireSafe maintain high accuracy in background screening while protecting client data. Finally, digital format forms and documents protect our clients from FCRA lawsuits by providing the necessary compliance documents automatically.

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