How the World’s Top Companies Build a Digital Screening Workflow

Today’s blog comes from Fama’s VP of Customer Success, Wendy Halson, who has helped numerous Fortune 500 companies figure out how to implement a digital background screening strategy within their organization. In this blog, Wendy discusses how digital screening workflows can help your company mitigate employee risk with reduced logistical overhead—even when your company is hiring at scale.

For many organizations, online screening has become central to successful talent acquisition. Shown to identify high-risk behaviors and save some of the world’s biggest brands from the headlines you’ll never see, online screening has become a new frontier of employee risk management. However, it is often an entirely new part of the hiring process and can introduce significant operational hurdles, especially if your company is hiring at scale.

While it’s possible to integrate online screening into your organization in just a few steps, it can seem daunting when you’re just starting out. Identifying which behaviors pose a hiring risk and when to take further action on a report can already be challenging. Imagine doing this for every single person in a large enterprise, and it becomes clear that when screening in high volumes, maintaining speed and quality can seem nearly impossible.

How to Build a Digital Screening Workflow

The first step to implementing an end-to-end process is building an escalation matrix, a set of “sensitivity thresholds” for online behavior that helps you prioritize who to review and what behaviors matter most. After specifying your search criteria based on your company’s key areas of risk, your team can set benchmarks for each job-relevant behavior. For example, if you are screening customer-facing retail employees for inappropriate language, you can determine how many instances in a report would warrant further review by your team. Then, if a candidate exceeds that threshold, they are marked for further decision-making. In this way, building an escalation matrix saves time and removes guesswork from your process.

The next step is to map out an adjudicative workflow, a “decision tree” that offers clear parameters for action for each prospective or current employee you screen. Building on the criteria specified in the escalation matrix, an adjudicative workflow helps reviewers know when to escalate a report for further review and decision-making, and when no further action is needed. It also helps reviewers apply the same criteria to each candidate. This boosts operational efficiency in your hiring process while reducing the risk of subjective or biased decisions.

Every day, I hear about new ways that digital screening workflows are helping top companies overcome the operational risks of hiring at scale. A new customer recently shared that their talent acquisition team was daunted by the prospect of implementing digital screening for over 200 hires each week. Shortly after building a screening workflow, the team reported a marked improvement in the quality of hires and a significant decrease in incidents reported to HR. This is just one example of how a well-executed process can help companies mitigate risk, even when hiring in large volumes.

A fully effective digital screening program goes beyond a candidate report or Google search—but with some planning and oversight, you can smooth out the process, make more informed decisions, and set your best hiring in motion.

If you’re interested in learning more about online screening or building a digital screening workflow for your business, reach out to Fama via our contact form or email sales@fama.io.