The last thing you want are staffing coordinators to place a candidates that have not been properly screened for particular clients. At the same time, you don’t want the screening process to be any more laborious than it already is. This is where your staffing software can streamline the process and set- up of automatic checks to make sure candidates meet client credentials during the placement process. 

Here are some steps you can take to improve your credentialing process in your staffing software:  

1. Identify all the screening requirements your clients have.

For instance, many of the professional, commercial, and industrial staffing firms who use our staffing software have clients that require:  

• Criminal background checks: Some do not accept candidates with any misdemeanors or felonies on record. Others will, but the offense must have occurred at least a certain number of years ago. 
• Drug testing: Some staffing buyers require specific types of drug testing, i.e. 5-panel or 10-panel. Also, some of your clients may not accept candidates that haven’t been drug tested past a certain number of years and months. 

2. Design and create a way to track your clients’ pre-employment screening requirements in your staffing software. 

You’ll probably need to get your staffing software provider or systems consultant involved.  Here are some of the data screens and fields we’ve created for staffing agencies that use our software. It is important to note that we didn’t have to use expensive customized programming to create this; instead we used the standard workflow and data customization tools that come with our software.  

In this example, a blended staffing firm had us create fields to indicate if the client requires drug testing, the type of test, and if a criminal background check is required.  

We also created additional data fields to track the clients’ credentials regarding misdemeanors and felonies that may turn up from background checks.  

3. Create the corresponding pre-employment screening fields in your staffing software’s candidate database. 

The following print screens show the additional data fields we created to track whether or not the candidate had a drug test, the type of drug test, and date of the test.  

Indicating type of drug test candidate received in the front office side of AST's staffing software

We also added the corresponding criminal background fields to make sure felony and misdemeanor specific requirements of certain clients are met.  

Defining candidate criminal history.

4. Set up checks during the placement process in your staffing software to ensure that candidates meet all the requirements and credentials of the client during the placement process. 

For instance, when a staffing coordinator tries to place a candidate that has not had the background screening that the staffing client requires, the placement is automatically blocked and the following message is displayed.  

Make sure you can setup these types of checks in your staffing software solution

5. Test customizations and automation you put in place within your staffing software and get feedback from your staffing coordinators.

Once you start automating and customizing your staffing software system, you can actually “over-automate” and put rules and messages in place that actually don’t work with the way you do business, and become a hindrance. So be sure to test out your automation and get buy-in from the people who use the system on a daily basis.  

Contact us if you have questions on streamlining your screening and placement processes, and would like to see more on how we’re helping staffing companies make and save money through the implementation of our fully integrated front and back office staffing software. 

Everett Reiss
Director of Marketing and Communications
Applied Systems Technology
845-534-7100 X1102
ev@astusa.com
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