How to Reduce Human Error in Background Checks for Better Decision Making

“Over the last decade, employers and background check companies have shelled out more than $325 million to settle related litigation,” reports CBS News.

This is just one example of how a simple data error can have drastic effects on hiring decisions and the related outcomes. Companies could hire unreliable or potentially dangerous employees based on your background screening information.

Mitigate your risk by reducing human error in background checks to keep your customers satisfied and safe. With thousands of existing criminal data sources, it can be hard to collect and organize the data, which leads to CRAs spending copious amounts of time trying to manually organize and correct the data.

How does human error impact background screening reports?

Human error is any deviation from the desirable outcome that was not intended by the user.

With the average data entry error rate at 1%, what does that mean for your background screening services? How many records are your employees entering each day? If the error rate rises, the results could detrimentally affect your background checks. Use better data to help reduce disputes by increasing consistency and decreasing human biases through data automation.

A reported dispute can take up to 30 days for background screeners to settle. This can be extremely time consuming and costly for CRAs.

The New York Times reported that Realpages typically charges landlords $12 per report. If there is a dispute, RealPages pays on average $7 to hand check the record, which shrinks its overall profits.

Be confident in your decisions to reduce the amount of disputes and lost profit margins by getting records straight from the source to ensure better data quality and accuracy.

Why Use Automation

Traditional background data providers manually enter data, which can vary between 10,000 and 15,000 keystrokes per hour. This ultimately increases their margins for human error in background data.

Decrease your researchers’ frustration with poor data quality by automating your data collection through digitized processes like Tessera’s automated criminal record solution.

Automation is focused on optimizing tasks normally performed manually by a person. It is crucial for businesses to implement automation processes as they continue to grow to operate more efficiently.

Executing data processing automation helps provide more accurate and reliable data for better and faster hiring decisions. Besides reducing human error in background screenings, there are a number of other advantages to using automation.  

Advantages of Data Automation

McKinsey estimates that automation has enabled organizations globally to enhance services by 43% and make better decisions by 34%.

Get started with data automation to start seeing cost-efficient benefits that reduce human error and find consistency in data processing, like:

• Reducing Data Redundancy – Automation helps you focus on only the most useful data to reduce turnaround time and diminish null reports. Customize your search results to get more accurate, relevant results to filter from thousands of sources.
• Increasing Productivity – Automation minimizes the demand for court runners and manual data entry, which can be cost-intensive, time-consuming, and monotonous tasks. CRAs that use automated data processes have decreased operational costs and increased employee productivity by shifting their focus toward more valuable activities.
• Creating a Standardized Process – Standardizing your operation processes helps improve the consistency and accuracy of data and saves your employees time. Through automation, CRAs gain the advantage of delivering quality using unified screening processes that remove obscure variables.
• Decreasing Turnaround Time – Fast turnaround times are extremely influential in your customer satisfaction. A traditional background data provider’s turnaround time is 1 to 3 days using a court runner – unlike Tessera’s automated average turnaround time of approximately 30 minutes. Get comprehensive results to your end users in a fraction of the time to gain a competitive edge. Having a fast turnaround time will attract new clients and give your company a competitive advantage in the CRA industry’s competitive landscape.

Decrease Turnaround Time, Search Costs, and Human Error

As the importance of fast turnaround time continues to grow, you will be seeing an upward trend for the demand of automation in the background screening industry.

Get ahead of your competitors by gaining access to one of the largest electronic criminal databases in the United States without sacrificing quality. Tessera’s data is closer to the source.

CRAs that use our comprehensive products have been able to decrease turnaround time by 75% and decrease search costs by 35%. One of our largest clients stated, “We could do 20 Tessera searches for the same county in the amount of time it takes for one search through another vendor.”

Reduce your turnaround time and human error rate by elevating your background check searches using Tessera Data’s automation technology processes. Contact us for more information to get started today!