For any recruitment business, when it comes to sourcing and placing contractor or permanent candidates, the importance of compliance should never be overlooked. It is vital that the onboarding process in particular is carried out correctly, with every detail checked thoroughly and accurately.
However, achieving this can prove to be time-consuming for HR teams and compliance managers, especially if you are juggling multiple contractors and candidates at a time. Therefore having effective and accurate tools and processes in place will help ensure all workers are compliant can bring a host of benefits to companies.
The best compliance software tools will help facilitate better processes and ensure everything necessary is completed when it comes to onboarding candidates, enabling safer working practices.
In this blog, we take a look at the importance of compliance, the problems faced if your compliance processes are not up to scratch, and examine the benefits of using a compliance tool for your recruitment business.
What do we mean by compliance?
In a nutshell, compliance is about ensuring companies and organisations are working in accordance with legal regulations, contractual obligations and industry standards.
When it comes to the recruitment process, compliance helps ensure the workers you are placing adhere to any relevant regulations, and that all the necessary checks and documentation have been collated prior to any commencement of work.
For recruitment businesses that onboard a high number of contractor or permanent candidates, compliance can become increasingly difficult to manage. With various details to acquire, and regulations to align with, being able to efficiently ensure compliance for all your candidates can prove challenging.
Compared to other industries, and even within other areas of recruitment, investment in technology and the onboarding process has been a rather slow – causing some systems to be slow and not fit for purpose. However the tide is beginning to change and many organisations are now seeking digital ways to enhance and improve their compliance processes.
How can compliance tools benefit recruitment businesses?
Dedicated compliance software can help recruiters make the onboarding processes they are carrying out more straightforward and manageable. Here is a breakdown of some of the areas where compliance tools can make a difference for recruiters.
Background Checks
Candidates will require at least some form of background check before they can legally start working. For example, somebody working in a school requires a DBS/criminal check, or somebody working in the finance sector requires checks on whether they have been suspected of fraudulent activity.. And of course there is the standard right to work check, where a company will need to make sure a worker is either a British citizen or has a legal working visa.
Running these background checks can be labour-intensive and time consuming due to factors such as having to collect hard copies, or log in to numerous systems to complete the different checks or retyping the same information numerous times
But using an effective compliance tool allows these tasks to be carried out with just the click of a button, removing many of the frustrations and difficulties background checks can present.
Candidate Communications
There are various security risks when recruiters and workers send personal data via email. Such as hacking, emails being sent to the wrong recipient, files being too large to be received . So issues such as data security, GDPR and logistical problems can raise their head.
Using a compliance tool with a secure candidate portal helps enable safe two-way communications and document sharing. A compliance tool also offers the benefit of having a single place for any communications and documents to be stored.
Document management
As well as being able to keep all documents in a single location, the best compliance tools will help manage these documents far easier. Document expiration can mean a candidate is no longer legally allowed to work, and this is a particular issue for contracts that get extended. It’s easy to forget that all the necessary documentation must run to the new date of employment. Even super organised businesses that have processes to address these kinds of issues could be open to human error. For example, they may list document expiry dates on an Excel spreadsheet, but it required regular manual checking and chasing to make everything remains up to date.
A good compliance tool should offerautomated tracking of document expiry dates, that notifies the recruiter when when candidates have documents nearing their expiration.
Data entry errors
With recruiters potentially needing to enter a candidate’s name, date of birth and other important information across numerous documents and systems, there is a chance of mistakes being made.
Having a single compliance tool that can integrate with other systems, or which pre-populates such information, helps significantly reduce the chances of an error being made around data entry.
Additionally, significant time savings can be made, as information does not need to be typed and entered on numerous occasions.
A culture of compliance
The use of software tools to improve onboarding compliance is a clear indication that your business is committed to operating in a responsible and ethical way.
Not only does this stand to benefit you from an operational perspective, but also contributes to your business generating a positive reputation within the industry and any fields in which you specialise.
The use of these tools also helps generate a culture of compliance. And once this culture becomes established and engrained, the benefits can be felt across the board through improved processes and enhanced outputs.
Selecting the right compliance software for your business
Recruitment onboarding software that carries out all the requisite tasks will help free up compliance teams to focus on other aspects of their workload.
So this is where Elements comes in! This recruitment onboarding software tool can be used once a candidate has been offered a role – be it contract or permanent – to carry out the relevant background checks before they start work. Elements also ensures that any documentation relevant to the candidate and the role remains current throughout their contract.
Elements will come with a single login, meaning users can access the relevant documents and carry out checks for a worker at the click of a button, all via one platform rather than jumping between different systems. This has significant cost and time savings, making your business much more flexible and scalable.
Enhance your compliance processes today
Compliance might not be the most glamorous part of the recruitment industry, but its importance is significant.
Being able to take advantage of software that improves your compliance processcan remove many of the headaches and long-winded manual tasks that compliance teams face.
If you are considering adopting compliance software and want to discuss your specific compliance needs, why not speak with a member of the Elements team? Simply get in touch and we will be happy to discuss your requirements.
