Event Roundup - Hiring for tomorrow: Screening speed dating
In this webinar, we invited representatives from pioneering organisations who are looking at how to make hiring more efficient and more secure. Presenting were:
Keith Rosser – Chair of the Better Hiring Institute
Keith Mabbitt – Chief Customer Officer at OneID
Andrew Davies – Global Head of Regulatory Affairs, Comply Advantage
Better Hiring Institute working to make hiring faster, fairer, and safer
In the shadow of the back to work budget and still high vacancy rates, innovation in hiring has never been so important. Keith explained that at the BHI, it’s believed that we can't harness the new found modern ways of working, whether that's flexible, remote, or offshoring, without having modern, innovative methods for hiring.
What is the Better Hiring Institute (BHI)?
The Better Hiring Institute has a mission to make UK hiring faster, fairer and safer.
UK hiring is one of the slowest globally. The BHI’s mission is to help UK businesses compete internationally by:
- making hiring as frictionless and as fast as possible,
- making hiring fairer and more inclusive,
- promoting safer hiring practices, particularly in our digital world.
As part of their work they identify new digital threats to digital hiring and how we can ensure that both workers and businesses are protected.
What is the BHI doing?
10 point plan for faster hiring
The plan was submitted to the Chancellor just after Christmas 2022, and has also been presented to various ministers and civil servants across different government departments who all have a role to play in making UK hiring the fastest globally. The next course of action will be to approach the Treasury to request sponsorship in order to help tie this work together and to drive it forward.
10 point plan for fairer hiring and the removal of barriers in the hiring process
In its final draft, these plans, alongside the faster hiring plan, are designed to help hundreds of thousands of people back into the workforce by targeting and attacking not just outdated hiring policy but also hiring practice.
Industry Toolkits
The BHI’s important industry better hiring toolkits provide standardisation and guidelines for best practice for a range of industries. In 2023, the goal is to launch toolkits to cover 80% of the UK workforce. With improved standards come a more standardised UK hiring process, and a smoother path towards innovation.
How do they work to achieve this?
The BHI works towards their goals by:
- Engaging with over 6000 employers in the UK - It's completely free to join the Better Hiring Institute and in return employers can join industry subcommittees who help to input and discuss hiring toolkits and challenges in their sector.
- Working with 10 industry specific sector subcommittees - these subcommittees are actively working to change hiring, alongside three expert panels; one on faster, one on fairer, and one on safer. These bring together academics, experts in the field and industry specialists.
- Working with government - the BHI works very closely with the Department for Business and Trade, and the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology.
- Hosting roundtables - in 2022 the BHI hosted 2 parliamentary roundtables and briefings, covering themes like digital right to work, to help influence government.
Powering digital hiring
In recent years, the BHI has worked with the Home Office to introduce digital Right To Work checks as a legally accepted screening method. After the scheme went live in October 2022, the BHI worked with employers and parliamentarians to debate the challenges within the new system, which have become clear proposals for further iteration and change to digital right to work checks. All of those proposals were accepted by the Home Office, and work towards implementing changes is now in advanced stages.
These proposals included:
- Expanding the accepted documentation by IDSPs to include those who do not have a valid passport. This would open up the digital Right to Work scheme to around 20% of work-seekers currently excluded.
- Introducing the widespread use of Digital Identity to speed up the sharing of documentation and credentials. The BHI have been working with DSIT to tackle to need for better joined up government data sharing with employers.
- Utilising more efficient alternatives to basic references such as HMRC Gateway and open banking. The BHI have been trialling this to excellent results, though for industries requiring more in-depth references for safeguarding issues there are limitations.
- Introducing criminal record check transferability
Cutting red tape and aligning schemes
Work towards streamlining the hiring process and attacking outdated practice includes:
- Working with DBS to ensure alignment between right to work and criminal record checks
- Removing the requirement for unnecessary qualifications as a prerequisite for a role
- Campaigning for salary transparency; job advertisements receive around 66% more applicants when disclosing salary
- Promoting wider alignment with the digital right to work scheme. For example, the NHS are enforcing the requirement to conduct face to face right to work checks, which runs counter to innovation and has been proved to be less robust than digital right to work checks.
Creating hiring frameworks
Alongside cutting red tape and powering digital hiring, there's also the need to create standardised hiring frameworks, which includes the Better Hiring Toolkit for Industry Series. The Better Hiring Toolkit for Care launched in January 2023 and has been downloaded over 6000 times. By the end of 2023, toolkits to cover a range of industry sectors will be launched (see table)
They include:
- best practice on hiring and onboarding,
- editable templates and supporting documents
- enhanced information on supply chain management
- relevant contacts for how and where to report issues
The kits are free to use, and are developed by industry, for industry, to ensure the highest levels of relevance.
OneID – fast, secure, digital ID
Using ID data verified and held by banks, OneID provides an inclusive and purely digital way for 47 million people in the UK to access a secure, verified, and consent driven digital ID today.
Almost all UK citizens have a UK bank account. To allow someone to open a bank account, banks must check physical ID documentation and use alternative ID where necessary, meaning inclusion for those without a valid passport or driving licence. They are regulated to conduct Know Your Customer and anti-money laundering checks to counter fraud, and have invested millions in the security of personal data.
OneID make this strong view of a person’s identity accessible securely online, using the bank’s existing internet and mobile solutions. Almost 93% of British citizens used online banking in 2022, meaning it’s a simple and familiar process with no additional registration or document scanning required.
Research shows that in general people trust their bank – with their money and also with their ID data – and OneID enables the reuse of this ID data with other businesses and situations, including within the hiring process.
This provides value both for account holders and the banks themselves, as it means they are able to provide an additional service to customers and reinforce their customer relationships. The identity is used to tackle fraud, enable access to age-restricted goods, products and services, as well as promote online safety and inclusion.
Bank verified ID versus Digital ID providers
Today, most identity providers scan a physical ID document, and/or capture biometric data, verify it, and securely hold the data to allow companies to benefit from it.
What are the risks of traditional digital IDs?
- Multiple identities created with multiple digital identity vendors
- Heightened security risks as our identity and personal data is stored in many places
- Differing levels of checks and due diligence on the data held about individuals between providers
- Impact on time and agility with different solutions in place
- Customer dissatisfaction and drop-off as accounts need to be created, documents uploaded, and biometrics scanned.
- Lack of inclusion for those without a valid passport or driving licence.
However, bank verified ID provided via OneID provides:
- A 100% digital process: physical documents have already been scanned and verified by an individual’s bank. This means there’s no need to register, create an account, scan documents, or complete any further ID verification procedures. It takes around 12 seconds to set up.
- Convenience: the service uses existing banking login processes, which are familiar, highly secure, and usually optimised for low friction login.
- Scale: it’s already available to anyone who banks online, meaning 47 million customers could access it now. It takes minimal customer education or effort.
- Includes tools to prove ID for criminal record checks and right to work
What next?
Using banks to validate ID opens up other opportunities, such as:
- Referencing
- Contract signing
- Onboarding with bank details
- Logging on to company systems on the first day at a new job.
- The possibility of future use in Right to Work, negating the need to scan physical documents.
Comply Advantage – using AI to manage financial crime risk
Comply Advantage is the financial industry's leading source of AI driven financial crime risk data and fraud detection technology. Their mission is to neutralise the risk of money laundering, terrorist financing, corruption and other financial crime. More than 1000 enterprises in 75 countries rely on Comply Advantage to understand the risk of who they're doing business with through the world's only global real time database of people and companies. Their company identifies thousands of risk events daily.
It’s important to know that the people and businesses you’re dealing with are not going to be dangerous to your reputation, compliance or business integrity by being involved with financial crime, terrorist financing or other nefarious dealings.
Andrew explained how Comply Advantage provides data and technology to help manage these types of risks.
Using instances of adverse media and other data about corporations and individuals, Comply Advantage maps this information against the typologies of financial crime, which includes human trafficking, fraud, money laundering, terrorist financing, etc. and presents this data to businesses, allowing them to make an informed decision about who they on board and do business with.
Catalysts for change
Customer considerations – as the technology available to us accelerates, and adoption rates of technologies such as remote hiring, real-time payments, and digital identity increases, the way we manage risk needs to keep pace.
Technology considerations – the way that these new technologies are handled and managed also needs to be protected from risks unique to data security, cloud-based technology, intelligent automation, and data integrity.
Regulatory considerations – the wider risks and dangers that law enforcement and regulators are concerned with includes fraud – not just at individual levels, but at institutional levels, too – and terrorist financing – the United Nations estimates that a single terrorist group can generate annual revenues of $1.6 billion.
Comply Advantage’s financial crime risk management anatomy
Andrew explained Comply Advantage’s approach to mitigating risks of financial crime within businesses and hiring.
Initial due diligence – who am I doing business with?
This includes capturing data through the onboarding process, as well as ID verification, employee screening for sanctions, PEP and adverse media, as well as risk profiling and scoring. This is about identifying and understanding the risk that a new employee could potentially bring to the business.
Ongoing due diligence – how is business being conducted?
This includes monitoring behaviour to check if the employee is behaving and working in a way that is consistent with employer expectation via behaviour analysis, ongoing screening, risk assessment and link analysis.
Remediation and reporting – Efficient management of alerts and cases, plus reporting and fine tuning
This includes ensuring robust processes are in place to action any alerts, ensure compliance through thorough reporting, as well as trend analysis and fine tuning.
Enterprise shared services – horizontally focused capabilities
This includes ensuring the risk management process is as streamlined as possible through the use of: automation to ensure employees are able to focus their time effectively; advanced analytics driven by machine learning to uncover unusual relationships; and scalability and orchestration of the system to ensure continuous availability.
Insights from our attendees
We took the opportunity to get a gauge on the experiences and opinions of our attendees.
Do you think it would be beneficial for your industry to have a Better Hiring Toolkit?
Yes – 100%
No – 0%
What’s your biggest hiring concern?
Length of the screening process – 36%
Lack of candidates – 26%
Quality of candidates – 16%
Length of the hiring process – 13%
Technology adoption – 6%
Where is innovation most needed in hiring?
Employee screening/onboarding – 86%
Shortlisting and interviewing – 10%
Candidate attraction – 3%
It’s clear that Better Hiring Toolkits are a valuable and needed resource, with 100% of our attendees saying that their industry would benefit from one being made available.
The length and lack of innovation within the screening and onboarding processes is clearly of concern to our attendees, as 36% said that the screening process length was their biggest hiring concern, and 86% said it was where innovation was most needed. This shows that more work is needed to ensure a smoother, faster, more streamlined process.
What’s next?
Digital hiring is a fast-moving area, with new developments happening all the time. Reed Screening is hosting regular events where you can keep up to date with the latest news and share your opinion on policy and process changes.
Below are a few of the upcoming events you can get involved with:
- Thu, May 11, 2023: Fraud at work: How fraudsters are targeting you - With developments in technology, ID fraud continues to plague UK employers. Hear about trends in ID document fraud, why it matters for you as employers, and what the big problems are.
- Tue, Jun 06, 2023: Innovation in criminal record checking - Digital futures - Are you one of the many employers carrying out police checks on staff? Join us for invaluable insights with the DBS & Disclosure Scotland.
- Thu Jul 06, 2023: Hiring for tomorrow Screening speed dating series – Join us for insights on the latest innovation, trends, and topics in the world of employee screening. Intended to give you short and snappy insights.