The Impact of COVID on Compliance & Onboarding

COVID-19 has had a number of contrasting impacts on compliance in these early days and will have a long-lasting impact on how we do business as usual.

Social distancing, the many shutdowns on non-essential services, the need to place specific essential roles to meet demand under extenuating circumstances has fueled the importance of accurate and timely compliance. Staffing firm’s internal and external credentialing has seen some requirements relaxed, others tightened, processes realigned, to navigate the ever-changing landscape.

• County and state closures have delayed the receipt of criminal screen results
• Closures of clinics have limited access to drug screen locations
• Covid-19 testing at clinics has raised concerns for applicants about exposure and requires us to direct them to locations that are not testing for Covid-19
• Clients not being flexible on requirements despite knowing the challenges involved

The point is, that requirements, processes, both legal and logistical considerations are changing almost day to day, constantly evolving at an accelerated rate. It was already hard work without the new changes.  Flexibility catches up, in that the burden of proof remains, and traceability, reporting, due diligence, doesn’t go away.    In fact it remains more critical than ever.  The legal ramifications of getting it wrong or missing a critical step can break a company. 

For many staffing firms’ the compliance cost of running a background check or using a service, and the cost and burden of its own team is a massive factor in its ability to be competitive. Placing staff on a timely basis, ensuring staff are ready to go, the ticking and checking, is often heavily manual.  Frequently paper based, reliant on large teams, hard to navigate file systems and email, and therefore a significant drag on business. To add to the burden these are not typically remote working friendly processes. Typical compliance teams reflect these processes, and often struggle both culturally and technology-wise from the demands COVID-19 is forcing on Staffing companies to be effective remote-working organizations. Technology-wise onboarding and compliance is often poorly integrated in the other core business systems like the ATS, document management, etc. Frequently missing are integrations to external services such as background checks, talent assessment, skills vetting services, and e-signing capabilities to provide traceability and a digital straight line between a candidate, job, contract and the key artifacts, results and dates. Digital transformation has passed them by however, digital transformation is now more important than ever.

If you are in these circumstances what can you do? This will be very much circumstantial. The situation may be so overwhelming you just need to keep peddling. Look for low hanging fruit, fine tuning where you can, maybe the only way is to navigate the immediate need to get everyone remote working and to respond immediately to things like payroll considerations, funding deadlines, etc, etc. Other staffing organizations are on the flip side as they will bounce back after COVID-19 as they’re using this period for digital transformation.

Whatever your circumstances, whether you want to look at transformation now or plan for it later 1Staff should be the benchmark for your digital transformation.

1Staff is a combined CRM and ATS with a configurable rules engine, process and document management, offering out of box features such as eSign, and API integration to your critical third party services such as background checking and talent assessment service providers. 1Staff built on the powerful Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform will streamline your business from lead through to placement, cut costs, provide integrity, and reduce your risks and exposure.

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1Staff is the leading staffing software and recruitment solution that fully leverages the Microsoft Dynamics platform.