Author: Claire Beasley
Posted: July 2023
Following on from our previous article, where we discussed the increased complexity and risk faced by onboarding teams, we delve further into this topic in part 2.
In this article, we explore other considerations within the onboarding function beyond the initial activities and examine the risks of maintaining compliance once a candidate has been onboarded with suggestions on how to mitigate those risks.
Recruitment onboarding challenge
Onboarding teams play a key role in any organisation, but especially in helping to form one of the initial impressions a candidate receives prior to them starting their new role. If the onboarding experience falls short of what a candidate is expecting, whether that be due to a long and complicated process, poor communication, or inadequate technology, it can cause individuals to think twice about joining and make them more susceptible to considering counter offers.
But it’s not just the initial impression that is important to consider – what about once a candidate is placed in a role?
After successfully onboarding a candidate, the tasks associated with sustaining compliance may gradually lose priority within the onboarding team. These tasks could include monitoring right to work documentation for candidates on visas, verifying the up-to-date insurance policies of Limited Company Contractors, and ensuring that candidates have confirmed they have read customer policies on an annual basis.
Onboarding teams play a key role in any organisation.
The decline of compliance prioritisation
We know that prioritising the work to maintain a compliant workforce can be challenging – particularly in a fast-paced contingent worker market where customers demand fast turnaround times. The urgency to onboard new candidates and ensure they have all the contractual and legal requirements in place prior to starting their role means those candidates are the key focus. Therefore, maintaining compliance of the existing workforce can be de-prioritised despite the likelihood of documents and working visas expiring.
Even when penalties for employing a worker whose visa has expired can be significant, ensuring up to date right to work documentation is retained can be surprisingly easy to miss when an onboarding team isn’t suitably resourced and effective processes are not in place.
Chasing candidates for updated documentation is expected in order to maintain compliance, but if communication is poor and the requests are being sent out late it can impact the candidate’s impression of the company beyond the initial onboarding stage. Equally a customer audit may uncover out of date documents and a candidate may have to leave their role at short notice, causing disruption to the team, a poor experience for all and a potential loss of a customer contract.
So, what can you do to ensure ongoing compliance remains a priority and make it easier for teams to adhere to all the requirements?
43% of recruiters think they spend too much time on compliance and onboarding.
Tips to make your onboarding process compliant
The Kingsbridge Annual Whitepaper revealed that 43% of recruiters think they spend too much time on compliance and onboarding. However, compliance is a critical activity. It is important that real value is placed on this work so that it isn’t disregarded and key processes aren’t bypassed.
Structuring the team and the activities to allow time to focus on maintaining compliance may help by:
• Ensuring the team is suitably resourced
so enough time can be allocated to monitor and action ongoing candidate compliance, whilst still being able to onboard new candidates at pace
• Ensuring the team has the right tools and technology
in place to manage the onboarding process as efficiently as possible while reducing the risk of time-consuming and costly errors.
• Emphasis on legal requirements and contractual obligations
so the business understands what actions the team needs to take and what needs to be prioritised to maintain a compliant workforce
• Diarising a fixed time each month
for the team to focus on compliance expiry dates for the following 90 days and make this a diary entry that cannot be moved, similar to a finance team’s end of month payroll
38% of recruiters say they do not have a platform dedicated to supporting contractor onboarding.
The role of technology and reducing risk
Simple steps to ensure ongoing compliance is given the time and resource required can make all the difference to the quality of the compliance function. However, the real benefit is seen in the use of technology to enhance the activities these teams carry out.
Using a vetting partner for background checks, or a platform for contract signing, can really enhance the speed and efficiency of compliance activities. But without the ongoing tracking of expiry dates for contracts, background checks and other key documentation, maintaining compliance of an existing workforce can still present risk.
Market leaders invest in better tech
Building robust processes and utilising platforms that can support tracking of these documents is useful but having one central place rather than multiple processes and platforms to perform this activity on, is the key differentiator between an efficient, well-organised function, and one that poses multiple risk throughout the process.
38% of recruiters told us that they do not have a platform dedicated to supporting contractor onboarding, yet there is an increasing amount of choice of technology on the market to support onboarding and compliance teams, that could really improve compliance processes and enhance user experience.
When evaluating new technology for these activities it is worth giving thought to whether it can support the following:
- Tracking of all documentation with an expiry date, including right to work documents, insurance policies, self-billing agreements, contracts etc. to flag expiry dates in good time.
- Integrate with third party organisations to verify information such as bank details, VAT numbers, Companies House information to remove the requirement to manually check and the potential for error in manually checking
- Provide visibility to the onboarding team via a RAG status dashboard to easily identify the status of all compliance checks and documents
- Issuing of automatic reminders to candidates to request they upload new documents directly to the platform in advance of a document expiring, to reduce chasing via email
- Use of AI to extract data held within documents to verify data to quicken the process of checking documents provided and reduce data entry
- Give oversight to a customer via a dashboard of the live compliance status of all their contractor workforce to provide reassurance of ongoing compliance
- Securely message candidates from within the platform, to avoid sending multiple emails or sending personal data through unsecure methods.
For companies where it is commonplace for their customers to hold audits on them, sometimes at short notice, implementing technology that contains all candidate documents and vetting checks in one place is a huge advantage reducing the time for audit preparation and providing onboarding teams with that continuous reassurance between audits to avoid any last-minute panic.
Technology is really starting to enhance these types of activities, helping companies to not only maintain ongoing compliance but add real value to their candidate’s onboarding experience as well as making it easier for onboarding teams to manage, reducing the risk of non-compliance.
Interested in reducing compliance risk?
Contact us to find out how Elements can improve your onboarding process, and reduce your compliance risk.
About the Author
Claire Beasley
Claire is an experienced compliance and service excellence professional, with over 20 years of experience in the recruitment industry working in operational roles with both a UK and global focus.
She has a comprehensive understanding of the challenges compliance and onboarding teams face, and enjoys finding ways to improve standards and optimise processes to address risk and enhance user experience.
Having led compliance teams, Claire is passionate about the contribution this function provides to businesses and believes there is a real opportunity with evolving technology to really enhance their value and the impact of the work they do.
