Automated Background Checks

Court research is labor-intensive

Open the door to a background screening firm that is struggling right now, and you’re likely to find a roomful of court researchers or more conducting criminal background checks and, or managing a team of field researchers.

Ordinarily, so much of what CRAs do relies on manual processes. You have researchers visiting the websites of courts and law enforcement agencies, running searches, pulling down data, adding the data to a report, formatting it, and so on. For the shrinking number of counties that still refuse to put their information online or that offer substandard online access, you need to send researchers physically to the court to access information on captive terminals.

This manual method of conducting background checks is tried and true, but it’s also time- and labor-intensive. When your business depends on manual research, as the volume of your orders increases, so will your labor costs. Scaling labor is expensive, risky, and often increases inefficiency.

So, while it’s great to have more business and more customers, it can often lead to less scalable processes and lower profit business models. The revenue bump you experience as a growing CRA often comes with a corresponding bump in expenses.

Fighting a talent war... and losing

A background screening company relies on the expertise of its researchers to succeed. But there are only so many people out there with the right combination of skill and experience.

The competition for talent is fierce in the background screening industry. Suppose you try to attract the best of the best with higher salaries. In that case, your expenses can quickly spiral out of control; finding the diamond in the rough, investing in training, only to have your new specialist get snatched up by a competitor, isn’t a winning strategy either.

Of course, the solution is to retain your best experts for the most challenging jobs and outsource what you can. Enter into a partnership with a trusted outsourced provider of criminal records research and court data. Think about your business more as your customers do. 

At first, it may seem like outsourcing will cost you more than keeping all your work in-house. But the advantage of outsourcing is you only pay for what you consume. The outsourced model will give you the flexibility to scale quickly and adapt to variations in demand. (In other words, you won’t end up paying people for a less-than-full workload.) This is especially important during and after our current pandemic where background screening companies need to do more with less.

“Rubber-band” growth

Growth isn’t linear. Sometimes that’s a good thing, as when a CRA turns a corner and sees rapid year-over-year growth. Sometimes it’s not a good thing, though, and growth can become elastic, expanding, and contracting in fits and starts. 

Rubber band growth, growth where you see cycles of expansion and contraction, can be a difficult management problem. There are two common culprits for this:

Client concentration.  Maybe you blew past your revenue expectations by taking on a new client, or perhaps you simply made inroads (and more business) with an existing one. In a scenario like this, losing that client can set you back. And scaling and descaling an organization can be like making copy after copy of an old cassette tape. Each reproduction may look similar, but the quality degrades every time a copy is made.

Losing a key employee. Losing a key employee, believe it or not, could be even worse than losing a client. They may have crucial knowledge or expertise that other team members lack. If they’re in a customer-facing role, their departure could also trigger the exit of clients that they work with. And if your resources are already at full utilization, losing the employee could result in overworking your other team members (and making them more likely to leave.)

This type of issue can sometimes feel like every time you take two steps forward, you end up taking one (or more) step back. Organizations are rarely healthy when they don’t work to avoid rubber band growth.

Expecting another boom 

A few years ago, the gig economy exploded onto the U.S. labor market. The demand for background screening skyrocketed. It was a great time to be in the background screening business, but the boom didn’t last forever.

Since the gig economy took off, more firms have entered the background screening industry. However, demand has leveled off. Churn and commoditization, leading to shrinking margins, have become significant problems as companies compete for the same contracts at lower and lower prices.

Don’t wait for another boom to get your business in order. If you’re not investing in your customer service organization and keeping your clients happy, you may lose work to your competitors who invest in their people, processes, and technology.

Inefficiency

When margins are tight, and new customers are hard to come by, you need to wring every bit of value out of each background check you run. Unfortunately, it’s never easy to change your ways. Too many background screening companies leave their inefficient processes in place because “That’s how we’ve always done it” or because “change is expensive.”

This is your sign to look for opportunities to cut excesses and run as lean as possible. For example, are there services you’re offering your customers for free when you could be charging them? Do you typically run searches that cover 25 years of convictions when you only need seven?

If you work with vendors, ask your vendors to do less for you (no more than you need) in exchange for a price break.

Advantages

• Complete cost control. Running your own criminal background checks using automation is nearly-free. 
• Stability and self-reliance. When you build it yourself, you ensure its long-term availability. You never have to worry about a third-party provider being acquired by another company, going out of business, or simply dropping the ball.

All automation should have:

Speed & efficiency

Investing in automation is just that: an investment. You want to make sure that you actually are seeing measurable improvements in turnaround time and efficiency. 

Less human input

It’s easier to build automation that requires human input at different stages of the process, often at the beginning or end. This process may be sufficient in the first couple of phases of development, but you ultimately want to remove as much human input as possible; this will speed up the process and free your team members to work on other areas that can’t be easily automated. 

Lower cost

Last, but certainly not least, is that your full-cost of automation (searches, yes, but also development, maintenance, and salaries) needs to come in under the price of conducting your court research without it.

Flexible extractions

Having flexible extractions is necessary when building automation. Not every website has one standard layout for every case. They will often have two or three different layouts for different levels of courts or charge levels. Building your process to extract from keywords or phrases instead of strictly using locations on a web page can significantly help improve their reliability.

Error handling

Error handling is also a must-have. While developing automation for new data sources, you will need a system in place to track and log sessions that fail to complete. Having proper error handling for each extraction and page visited by the agent makes it much easier to find the breaking point and correct the issue.