Wasting time is not good for any business and the people working in Human Resources, in Australia or elsewhere, are often the first to come up with new ways of improving speed in every process, including their own work. Modern technology has been of great help for HR as ever more sophisticated tools allow recruiters to speed up pre-employment checks. With the right tools everything can go faster from selecting candidates worthy of a job interview to background checks to make sure they’re in no way dangerous to the organisation.
Pre-screening candidates
Whenever a company posts a job ad, the people in the HR department brace themselves for an influx of resumes they’ll need to read. Lucky for them, this process can now be almost fully automated using modern software, like resume screening tools. There are various such tools available and they all do pretty much the same thing. When you run the resume through a screener, the program will identify certain characteristics, including education, work experience and skills, setting aside the candidates that seem most promising.
When the recruiter sits down in front of their computer they only need to go through the resume that passed the initial screening.
Assessment tests
What people put on their resume is one thing and what they’re actually good at is a completely different thing and recruiters need some means to assess a candidate’s real skills. You can call them in to take a test or you can, once again, automate the whole process, using online assessment tests.
These tests can be tailored to meet your specific needs, but generally they fall into several categories, such as cognitive ability testing, situational judgment testing, personality questionnaires, a right to work check or test to see if they have adequate visa or work rights in the country, etc.
If you’re planning to hire immigrants, you can also have them take a spoken language assessment test, also online.
Automated interview scheduling
Keeping track of all candidates can be very time-consuming, especially when you have several vacancies. Fortunately, modern software tools allow HR managers to do everything automatically. This will streamline the whole process and reduce the risk of scheduling errors, as machines make less mistakes than humans.
Online criminal history checks
This is an essential part of pre-employment screening. Even when criminal history checks are not mandated by law, many Australian employers prefer to use caution and make sure the selected candidates do not have a criminal record, or, at least, were not convicted of serious offences.
This used to be a major time-waster for the HR managers, as they had to direct their candidates to their local police station to ask for a background check. Getting the results back often took weeks, which is an unacceptably long time when managers are pressuring you to hire someone to fill a vacancy.
These days, however, Australian businesses can order a national police check online using a character check agency like the following website link for the ANCC service which can be found on the following link: www.australiannationalcharactercheck.com.au and provides an online service via software. Filling in the required identity details for each candidate only takes a few minutes, and the results come back in 24 hours (normally) straight to the email. Just one look at the result is enough to let you know if that individual is an honest person you can hire without being afraid they might become a liability.
Improved level of quality of new hires
It is known that background check implementation and then automation not only increases safety in an organisation and the broader community which the organisation has interactions with but also improves the level of quality of the HR department’s hiring efforts. This is due to the fact that it enabled HR professionals to recruit people based on characteristics that are morally and ethically suitable and therefore helping to become a predictor for job success.
Automation of pre-employment screening checks and a strong pre-employment screening policy in the organization also leads to better and consistent hiring decisions.
This is particularly important in industries such as healthcare, aged care, banking, transport or other sectors where recruitment professionals have the need to to review and assess hundreds or sometimes even thousands of job candidates and those candidates will end up having some sort of contact with vulnerable people in the community or be given a position that entails a certain level of trust (e.g. money handling).
Wrapping up
Now of course it is known that even the most qualified of the candidates need to pass a pre-employment background check before they are officially hired by the company and their employment gets cemented. Organisations in the modern era will be submitting to a high level of risk and possible scrutiny if they do not include background checks as part of their hiring processes.
It has also been shown that this part of the hiring process (pre-employment background checks) can be automated as well!
From methods like pre-screening of candidates through their educational credentials and work/employment history to automated interview scheduling tools and then finally a national criminal background check/police check which will give the recruiter a sound idea of any past criminal offences that may put the organisation, its people or assets at risk.
