Hiring temporary and contract workers requires a faster process than one that will lead to a permanent placement. A company may need more people during the holiday rush, for a limited project, or to fill an opening right away, and they want the staffing agency to act quickly.
Quickly doesn’t mean shoddily, however, and a complex screening process may turn away an otherwise qualified candidate. The ideal balance is one that a recruiter can follow each time for an open position, creating a trail of documentation for the clients that need to know how their new hire came to be.
Following are the five essential steps to a proper screening process.
1. Define the Role Before You Screen
The screening process begins with the understanding of the task. Before you start ordering every background check available, ask yourself what exactly the person will do, where they will do it, whether they will have access to money, and if there are any role-specific requirements the client has asked for. Temporary work can require vastly different screening because there is such a range of positions: think about a warehouse worker, home-based customer service rep, accounting contractor, and healthcare administrator. Different job sites and responsibilities may require different levels of screening.
Create a brief overview of the role for the recruiters to reference before they begin the screening. It should be general enough to cover the basics of the work without giving away information that the client would only share with an in-person interview.
2. Confirm the Client’s Requirements in Writing
Staffing agencies typically work with multiple clients, and each one has its standards. Don’t count on a recruiter having memorized what your main customer wanted three months ago.
Make sure that requirements for each account are listed clearly and accessible to every member of the placement team, and update them whenever a customer makes a significant change to their policies. This is also an issue if two recruiters on the same team review similar roles and miss that a certain client has different requirements for the same position depending on a few factors.
As a staffing agency that deals with high turnover, it is worth having a repeatable process for staffing agency background checks that can still account for different client requirements. The point is not to treat every assignment identically, but to make the routine steps consistent enough that recruiters are not reinventing the procedure each time. That becomes especially useful when several recruiters handle different accounts and need to follow the same documented instructions.
It may be worth noting the difference between preference and necessity, particularly if the law or industry-standard rules are more strict. Background screening laws change in different states and locations, and a good staffing agency will utilize resources that help them understand what they can and cannot do before they accept the job. The more a client specifies, the more requirements they will have to follow, and the more potential issues there will be to navigate.
3. Build Your Process Into the Placement Schedule
There is no reason for the screening to occur any later than the moment the candidate consents and is considered suitable for the position. It should, ideally, begin as soon as possible, given the agency’s usual time frame for assignments. Decide on who has access to the results, who initiates the examination, where the status of each candidate is reported, and what must be completed before the person can arrive at the worksite.
A brief set of status labels should probably be established in case candidates have questions. Someone opening an application, providing proper authorization, completing the screening, and informing supervisors of problems or next steps can go through an ordered series of actions. The exact terms for each category are not as valuable as having them defined somewhere other than in a recruiter’s head.
4. Review the Candidate Against a Set Policy
The most important part of any background examination should already have been decided before the candidate even applies. The person, team, or program that reviews the result should know what standards they will use when a report comes in. The specific policy should concern the position they have applied for and consider the terms from every applicable federal, state, and local law, as well as any special conditions the client may have required or agreed to.
Where an individual background check needs to be considered, the supervisor or automated system should understand when it is necessary to defer the decision to a higher level or involve legal counsel. The more objective a set of rules is, the less room there is for prejudice, and the more defensible the decisions are if problems arise later on. This becomes even more important when staffing agencies place candidates in high-demand roles, where there is pressure to fill several jobs at once.
5. Audit the Procedure as Placements Come to a Close
Once a successful temporary or contract screen has been completed, it is a good idea to take inventory of how the process went overall. Examine where it became delayed, which client orders got mixed up, and whether the necessary information was gathered to make any decisions. Next, determine if the candidate was properly prepared for the next stage before the screening started.
The purpose is not to remove every potential roadblock and speed up the process artificially, but to recognize which parts of the procedure are causing unavoidable delays. There are screening types that take longer than others, and situations where the result has to be reviewed by additional parties before the next step occurs. The staffing agency should be able to recognize if these are built-in limitations or if there is a flaw in the procedure that is costing time and money.
A successful temporary staffing business moves quickly but keeps control of the process. Defining the role, documenting the client’s requirements, building the screening into the workflow, reviewing the results against a set policy and auditing the procedure as placements close give the recruiters a repeatable process without removing their ability to make decisions. It assumes that not every candidate will be the same, and every agency should know its standard operating procedures well enough that they can be applied to every applicant.
The draft structure follows the general shape of a guest-post content submission and leaves the link-building opportunity within one developed body section instead of the premise.